Nigerian soldiers and police officers stand at the entrance of a school in Mando, Kaduna state, on March 12, 2021, after a kidnapping. (Photo by AFP)

Unknown gunmen have attacked a boarding school in northwestern Nigeria and kidnapped 140 students, the latest in a series of mass abductions targeting schoolchildren and pupils in the African country.

The attack took place at the Baptist High School in southern Kaduna state in the early hours of Monday, with a school official saying 25 students had managed to escape.

The kidnappers took away 140 students, only 25 students escaped. We still have no idea where the students were taken, said Emmanuel Paul, a teacher at the school.

Kaduna state police spokesman Mohammed Jalige confirmed the report of the assault but he could not give details on the number of pupils taken.

Tactical police teams went after the kidnappers, he said. We are still on the rescue mission.

Bethel Baptist High School is a co-education college established by Baptist church in 1991 at Maramara village in Chikun district outside the state capital Kaduna.

Since December last year, around 1,000 students and pupils have been abducted by heavily-armed criminal gangs in different Nigerian states, with some of them having been released after negotiations with local officials and ransom payments.

Last month, armed assailants attacked a secondary school in the remote town of Birnin Yauri in Nigeria’s northwestern state of Kebbi, killing a police officer and abducting five teachers as well as an unspecified number of students.

On May 30, armed bandits kidnapped an unknown number of students from an Islamic school in central Nigeria, with reports saying between 150-200 boys and girls aged six to eighteen were at the school when the assault happened.

Moreover, 14 of the students who had been abducted from a university in northwestern Nigeria were released after 40 days in captivity last month.

In yet another incident on April 20, gunmen, locally known as bandits, stormed Greenfield University and kidnapped around 20 students. A member of the school’s staff was killed in the attack.

Five of the students were executed a few days after the abduction to force families and the government to pay a ransom. A total ransom of 180 million naira ($440,000) was paid for their release, according to the media.

Gunmen kidnap staff from northwest Nigerian hospital

Monday’s attack, the fourth mass school kidnap in Kaduna state since December, came just hours after gunmen snatched eight medical employees from a health center in Zaria, Kaduna state.

Medical officials said the assailants kidnapped up to eight people, including the one-year-old child of a nurse, from a residential quarters belonging to the staff of the National Tuberculosis and Leprosy Centre hospital in Zaria.

So far, there has been no ransom demand, said Maryam Abdulrazaq, the hospital spokesperson. We have not heard from the bandits since they took them away.

In a separate statement, Kaduna police spokesman Muhammed Jalige said that a large number of armed men from the same group attacked the divisional police headquarters at roughly the same time in an attempt to overrun the officers on duty.

Jalige said police repelled the attack after a heavy exchange of gunfire, injuring some of the attackers.