Gunmen from a criminal gang kidnapped 25 students from their hostel and killed the school deputy in an early morning raid on a northwestern Nigerian girls’ secondary school in Kebbi on 17 November, 2025.
The attack comes more than a decade after 276 girls were abducted from Chibok in the restive northeastern Borno state and sparked international outcry that rallied people around the “#BringBackOurGirls” global social media campaign.
Since then, there has been a string of other abductions involving school children across northern parts of Nigeria.
This is the second mass school abduction in Kebbi in four years, following the June 2021 incident when bandits took more than 100 students and staff members from a government college.
The students were released in batches over two years after parents raised ransom.
Some of the students were forcefully married off and returned with babies.
Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, has been plagued by armed violence since the 2009 emergence of the Boko Haram group in the Lake Chad basin, in the northeast of the country.
