At least 37 students remained missing after gunmen raided a secondary school in Lassa, Borno State, on Monday while pupils were sitting exams. The attack, blamed on assailants from the Islamic State West Africa Province group, also left at least three people dead.
The first official count had sounded far smaller. The military said rescuers had brought out 10 people and that only one person was still missing, but by Tuesday the figure had widened sharply as local authorities accounted for more students who had not come home. The gap matters because it suggests the scale of the raid was not clear when the first rescue claims were made.
Ijagla Ijabila, the area’s local government councillor, shared a list of students in captivity with journalists, helping to identify who had not been found. Borno Commissioner for Education Lawan Abba Wakilbe said 25 female students, 11 male students and one staff member were still being held, while eight people, including the school’s vice principal, had been freed.
The school attack fits a pattern that has become grimly familiar in Nigeria’s conflict-hit north and centre, where kidnapping for ransom has become a common tactic. Nigeria has been fighting an armed uprising since 2009, and violence in the northeast has eased from the peak seen a decade ago, but school abductions have continued to surface. In May, gunmen kidnapped more than 40 pupils from Borno State’s Mussa village, and armed men rounded up dozens of schoolchildren from three schools in Oyo State.
The unresolved question now is not whether the attack happened, but how many of the missing can still be found. The list held by Ijabila and the count given by Wakilbe point to one conclusion: the school raid was larger, and more chaotic, than the first military account suggested.
