The Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) on Saturday gave a new tally from the previous day’s school abduction, saying 315 students and teachers had been seized by unknown attackers.
Previous reports had spoken of 215 schoolchildren.
The incident at St. Mary’s co-education school in Niger state comes on the heels of another attack in neigboring Kebbi state on Monday, where 25 girls were abducted from a secondary school.
The abduction in Nigeria state is on the same scale as that in northeastern Borno state more than a decade ago, when nearly 300 girls in the town of Chibok were kidnapped by jihadis from the Boko Haram group.
Some of those girls remain missing.
What did CAN say?
CAN said Reverend Bulus Dauwa Yohanna, who is also the Catholic Bishop of Kontagora diocese, to which the school belongs, gave the revised toll after visiting St Mary’s.
“After we left the school at Papiri, we decided to make calls, do verification exercise and do further inquiries on those we had thought escaped successfully, only to discover that 88 more students were also captured after they tried to escape,” he said in a statement.
“This now makes it 303 students (male and female) including 12 teachers (4 females and 8 males) bringing the total to number of abducted persons to 315,” he said.
The students were said to range in age from 10 to 18.
Schools closed in response
The Nigerian government has so far not commented on the number of students and teachers abducted.
The number of children kidnapped from St. Mary’s is almost half of the school’s 629 students.
The Niger state government has closed many schools, as have authorities in the nearby states of Katsina and Plateau.
President Bola Tinubu has cancelled international engagements, including attending the G20 summit in Johannesburg, in response to the crisis.
The two abduction operations and a separate attack on a church in the west of the country, in which two people were killed, have happened since US President Donald Trump threatened military action over what he called the killing of Christians by radical Islamists in Nigeria.
Both Christians and Muslims are often the targets of attacks in Nigeria, where heavily armed groups have killed thousands and carried out kidnappings for ransom in rural areas of northwest and central Nigeria over the past few years..
The abduction in Kebbi state was in a Muslim-majority town.
The gangs have camps in a huge forest that extends over several states including Zamfara, Katsina, Kaduna, Sokoto, Kebbi and Niger.
While most of the gangs have no ideological leanings, Nigeria’s northeast has also been gripped by a jihadi insurgency over the past 16 years.
