DAKAR, Senegal — The children were still sleeping when gun-toting men on motorcycles arrived at the Catholic boarding school in the early morning hours Friday, witnesses told friends and family members. They fired their weapons into the air and headed straight for the elementary dormitories. Then the gunmen forced dozens of young students, some as young as 6, into a large truck and sped away into the darkness.
Many other details about the mass kidnapping at St. Mary’s School in Niger state, in northwest Nigeria, are still unknown, including the identity of the kidnappers and the number of children taken, with estimates ranging from 50 to more than 100. Such incidents are common in this long-volatile region where criminal gangs operate with impunity, analysts said, targeting schools and places of worship and holding hostages for ransom.
Assailants kidnapped two dozen girls from a school in neighboring Kebbi state overnight Monday. The next day, two worshipers were killed during a live-streamed church service in the state of Kwara.
The violence comes at a fraught moment in U.S. relations with Nigeria, the most populous nation in West Africa. President Trump recently caught Washington and the region off guard when he threatened to go “guns-a-blazing” into Nigeria if the government failed to address the persecution of Christians. On Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth met with a delegation of Nigerian security leaders at the Pentagon, according to a statement from his office, to discuss “ways to make tangible progress on stopping violence against Christians in Nigeria and combatting West African jihadist terrorist groups.”
Hegseth “emphasized the need for Nigeria to demonstrate commitment and take both urgent and enduring action to stop violence against Christians and conveyed the Department’s desire to work by, with, and through Nigeria to deter and degrade terrorists that threaten the United States,” the statement said.
Rep. Riley Moore (R-West Virginia), who Trump has appointed to lead an investigation into the killing of Christians in Nigeria, described the situation at St. Mary’s as “heartbreaking” in a Friday post on X. “Enough is enough,” he wrote. “We must do everything we can to defend our brothers and sisters in Christ.”
Basuna Magaji, 54, is an uncle to four students at St. Mary’s, which is known as one of the best schools in the area. His 20-year-old nephew and 16-year-old niece managed to escape their abductors, he said, but his brother’s two youngest children — an 11 year-old girl and 6-year-old boy — were taken.
The older children told Magaji that they were able to slip away as the armed men herded them into the truck around 3 a.m., sprinting nearly two miles back to the nearest village. “They were crying, tired, they had no shoes,” he recounted during a phone interview.
On Friday afternoon, the local government in Agwara said all schools would be closed immediately “to protect the lives and safety of students, teachers and school workers.” Spokesman Bello Gidi said authorities are still trying to determine how many students were abducted.
Magaji said his brother and other families are camped out at the school, waiting for answers.
Surging violence
Nigeria’s population of 230 million is roughly split between Christians and Muslims. While Trump officials have focused on the dangers facing Christians, experts say Muslim communities are frequently victimized as well, and many attacks are not religiously motivated.
Insecurity is widespread throughout the country. Islamist insurgencies rage in the northeast, farmer-herder conflicts are common in central Nigeria, and the northwest — where the two school kidnappings took place — is afflicted by increasingly violent banditry.
While bandits were likely responsible for the kidnapping at St. Mary’s, experts said, Islamist militant groups have made recent gains in the area. Sometimes, they said, criminals sell hostages to the militants, who ransom them back to their families.
“There are rivalries and cooperation when it comes to the relationship between the bandits and the Islamists, and it could be a mix of both” said Confidence McHarry, a senior analyst at SBM Intelligence, a Lagos-based consultancy. “The financial incentive is very strong.”
Between July 2024 and June 2025, according to an SBM report, 4,722 people were kidnapped across Nigeria in nearly 1,000 separate incidents. The kidnappers received the equivalent of $1.7 million in ransom payments, the report found.
McHarry said the money is often paid by a mix of federal and local governments, in addition to relatives. The vast majority of school kidnappings take place at government institutions, which are not religious. This makes the kidnapping at St. Mary’s especially “high profile,” he said, and “will definitely lead to more attention and more pressure on the Nigerian state.”
A spokesman for Nigerian President Bola Tinubu did not respond to requests for comment. Tinubu had postponed international travel plans this week after the earlier kidnapping in Kebbi state.
“My fear is that we are in a new cycle,” said James Barnett, a Nigeria specialist based between Lagos and the United Kingdom, noting that mass kidnappings “tend to come in bursts.” They were quite common in 2021, he said, when there was “something of a copycat effect.”
Bandits look for soft targets, Barnett added, typically driven more by opportunism than ideology. The 24 girls taken on Monday were from Muslim families while those abducted Friday were from a Catholic school, he noted.
Some Christian communities have been targeted, said Dengiyefa Angalapu, a Research Analyst with the Centre for Democracy and Development. Many big churches, he said, now have armed guards out front.
Nigeria could use U.S. assistance to address the security crisis, but any help should be “more strategic than tactical,” Angalapu said. “Our country is very divided,” he continued. In the event of a heavy-handed American intervention, “there is no guarantee that things won’t escalate.”
A missionary in Agwara, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation, said he personally knew three children kidnapped from St. Mary’s. Older children who escaped told him the truck driven by the kidnappers was the length of a bus. They feared the number of students abducted could be much higher than initially reported.
In the villages now, “there is a lot of crying and praying,” the missionary said. “Everyone is calling us and asking us for prayers.”
Ombuor reported from Nairobi and Jamiu from Abuja. Alex Horton in Washington contributed to this report.
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