Lagos, 10 March 2024 (dpa/MIA) - An armed group in Nigeria has attacked another school and abducted 15 children in the third mass kidnapping incident in a fortnight, police said on Sunday.

The heavily armed assailants broke into a school dormitory in the state of Sokoto on Saturday morning. As well as the children, a woman from the village of Gidan Bakuso was also taken away, according to police spokesman Ahmad Rufa'i. 

The police only found out about the kidnapping hours later as the village is in a remote area with no mobile phone service or paved roads, the spokesman said. The village was therefore not accessible by car, but only by motorbike.

He did not say who the suspected perpetrators were. However, this and two more recent incidents have echoes of the mass kidnapping in April 2014 of 276 schoolgirls from a boarding school in the town of Chibok. Many of the girls taken by the Islamist terrorist militia Boko Haram are still missing.

Last Thursday, 287 girls and boys were abducted from their school in the village of Kuriga in the north-western state of Kaduna.

In late February, a mass kidnapping of internally displaced persons took place in the north-eastern state of Borno. According to the United Nations, more than 200 people were abducted.

Previous abductions of women and children by Boko Haram and criminal groups in the north of the country usually involved extortion of ransom money, forced recruitment into armed groups or sexual violence.

Kidnappings have risen sharply in recent months, especially in the state of Kaduna and other north-western areas of Nigeria, Africa's most populous country with around 220 million inhabitants.

According to the economic and security consultancy SB Morgen, ransom payments are now the main reason for the kidnappings.

Following Thursday's abductions in Kuriga, Vice President Kashim Shettima travelled to the village on Saturday to meet with local authorities and the parents of the victims.

The chairman of the African Union Commission, Moussa Faki Mahamat, on Sunday called for the "immediate and unconditional release" of the abducted children. In the past, however, security forces have only rarely been successful in freeing kidnap victims.

Photo: MIA Archive