Students too scared to return to Nigeria school after attack

LAGOS, Nigeria – Frightened students are staying away from the school in northern Nigeria where Boko Haram extremists seized 110 girls in a raid a week ago, while pressure grows on the government to act.

The Government Girls Science and Technical College in Dapchi in Yobe state had been closed following the attack that reminded many of Boko Haram’s kidnapping of 276 girls from a boarding school in Chibok in 2014.

Teachers resumed classes Monday, a day after Nigeria’s government for the first time acknowledged the number of girls missing, but students were absent.

“My children did not go back to the school because they are too frightened to go there. We parents are equally frightened to see our daughters go there,” said Mohammed Mele, who has two children in the school.

Another parent, Mohammed Ibrahim, told the Associated Press the family will look for a safer school. “Many other parents are not likely to send their children back,” he said.

Students and parents are still going through trauma and the school will reopen when “frayed nerves cool down,” Yobe state education commissioner Mohammed Lamin said.

The fate of the 110 girls is not known, but witnesses have said the Islamic extremists specifically asked where the girls’ school was located. Some eyewitnesses reported seeing young women taken away at gunpoint. Information Minister Lai Mohammed said 906 students were in the school at the time of the attack.

Anger has been growing in Nigeria as the government struggles to respond to the attack, with authorities giving conflicting reports early on.

The Bring Back Our Girls movement that brought the Chibok mass abduction to world attention has embraced the cause of the Dapchi families, though with some astonishment that the tragedy has happened again. As the fourth anniversary of the Chibok kidnappings approaches, the movement says 112 of those schoolgirls are yet to be found.

“It is terribly EXHAUSTING but WE SHALL STAND. WE SHALL,” one of the movement’s organizers, Oby Ezekewsili, said on Twitter of the Dapchi attack.

The latest mass abduction is a major challenge for President Muhammadu Buhari, who has called the Dapchi kidnappings a “national disaster” and vowed that no effort will be spared to locate the girls.

Buhari won elections in 2015 while making the fight against Boko Haram a priority. His government has repeatedly claimed that the Islamic extremist group has been defeated, but it continues to carry out deadly suicide bombings in the north, often using women and children who have been kidnapped and indoctrinated.

Many fear the girls seized last week were abducted to become brides for Boko Haram extremists. Some of the schoolgirls taken in the Chibok mass abduction were forced to marry their captors. About 100 of the Chibok girls have never returned to their families.

Nigeria faces another presidential election next year.