A Christian association announced on Saturday that the number of students and teachers abducted the previous day from a Catholic school in central Nigeria had risen to 315, in the second such attack in a week in Africa's most populous country.

The raid carried out early Friday morning against the Saint Mary mixed school in Niger State, in central Nigeria, came after Monday's attack by armed men on a high school in the neighboring state of Kebbi and the abduction of 25 girls.

The Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) said in a statement that it had revised the previous count of 227 abductions in Saint Mary "after a verification exercise and a final census".

"The total number of victims abducted (...) at the Saint Mary Catholic Primary and Secondary School in Papiri, in the Agwarra Local Government Area, Niger State, now stands at 303 students and 12 teachers," according to the association.

This figure represents almost half of the school's student body (629 students enrolled).

Authorities in the neighboring states of Katsina and Plateau have ordered the closure of all schools as a precautionary measure.

The government of the State of Niger has also closed many schools, and President Bola Tinubu has cancelled his international commitments, including his participation in the G20 summit in Johannesburg (South Africa), in order to manage the crisis.

These two mass kidnappings and the attack on a church in the west of the country, which left two dead, occurred after US President Donald Trump threatened military intervention in Nigeria because of what he called massacres of Christians by radical Islamists.

Nigeria remains scarred by the abduction of nearly 300 girls by Boko Haram jihadists in Chibok, Borno State (northeast), more than 10 years ago. Some of them are still missing.

Intensification of kidnappings

The CAN indicated that Reverend Bulus Dauwa Yohanna, Catholic bishop of the Diocese of Kontagora, which includes Saint Mary's School, provided the new report after a visit to Saint Mary's.

"After we left the Papiri school, we decided to contact the students, conduct checks and carry out further investigations on those we thought had managed to escape. We then discovered that 88 other students had been captured after attempting to flee," the reverend said, as quoted in a statement.

"This brings the number of students (boys and girls) and teachers (four women and eight men) to 303, bringing the total number of people abducted to 315," he added.

For years, heavily armed criminal gangs, referred to as "bandits" by the authorities, have been intensifying their attacks in rural areas of northwestern and central Nigeria where the state presence is weak, killing thousands and carrying out kidnappings for ransom.

These groups have established their camps in a vast forest that spans several states, including Zamfara, Katsina, Kaduna, Sokoto, Kebbi and Niger.

A UN source, speaking on condition of anonymity, indicated that the girls abducted on Monday in Kebbi had probably been taken to the Birnin Gwari forest in the neighboring state of Kaduna.

As Nigeria faces multiple security challenges, hostage-taking has increased nationwide and has become a preferred tactic of armed gangs and jihadists.

Although the "bandits" have no particular ideology and are motivated by financial gain, their increasing rapprochement with jihadists in the northeast is worrying authorities and security analysts.

For 16 years, jihadists have been waging an insurgency in the northeast of the country with the aim of establishing a caliphate.

AFP