The Government Science secondary school in
Kankara district was attacked by armed gunmen on Friday.
Parents gather at the school on Sunday following the abductions.
Abuja, Nigeria: Some 337 students are still unaccounted for after gunmen attacked a school in northern Nigeria over the weekend, a government official told CNN on Monday.
Local police said a large number of attackers
riding motorbikes ambushed the all-boys Government Science Secondary School in
Kankara late Friday, in a possible kidnapping-for-ransom attempt.
The apparent kidnappers are making a demand
via a teacher at school, Abdu Labaran, the director general of media for the
governor of Nigeria's Katsina state, said Monday.
"The abductors of the Kankara students
have contacted a teacher and asked him to tell the government to stop the
helicopter surveillance. They have not asked for ransom," said Labaran,
who added that the military had deployed in the area to search for the boys.
He said that at least 446 students had been
handed over to their parents, but they have been unable to reach scores of
families to confirm the safety of students because of bad phone connectivity.
The United Nations strongly condemned the
abductions on Sunday, and called for the "immediate and unconditional
release" of the children.
There have been varying estimates of the
number of children that were kidnapped from the school late on Friday.
Government officials said it was difficult to accurately track the numbers as
some children ran away during the attack, while others escaped and made their
way back to villages and the school over the weekend.
Garba Shehu, a spokesman for Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, told CNN via text message
on Monday that some of the students had been interviewed by military officers.
"Some of the returning students debriefed
by the military disclosed that ten of their colleagues were taken by the
bandits, but this still needs to be verified," he wrote, adding that there
could still be others unaccounted for.
"The forests and neighboring villages are
being searched and parents are being contacted for information about their
children."
A school official told CNN that at least three
of his students escaped their abductors and returned to the school on Sunday.
He said they had not eaten and that they had bruised and swollen legs from
hours of trekking. CNN is not naming the school official to protect his safety.
"They commanded the crowd like a herdsman
herd the sheep," Hassan Abdul-Bashir, a 13-year-old student at the school,
told CNN on Saturday. He said the gunmen were asking students for money,
ransacking their lockers and taking some of their belongings. "They shot
the policeman guarding our school. I saw them driving many students."
Several more students were rescued on Monday, according to Labaran.
"Fifteen students were rescued today by
military in their search and rescue operations, while the police rescued
another person and a third came back to parents' house himself," he said
Monday.
Musa Adamu, a senior secondary student at the
school, said he and many of his roommates jumped out of the windows when they
heard the gunshots on Friday. "We headed to the fence and climbed on it
and jumped down," the 18-year-old told CNN. "The gun shots sound got
louder, we ran in different directions ... into the forest. Most of us had no
shoes on, and we kept running until we got tired and the sound of the gunshots
fainted."
Nigerian authorities said the motive for the
attack is unclear, but added the area has seen kidnappings for ransom attacks
in the past.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres urged
the Nigerian authorities to "bring those responsible for this act to
justice."
"The Secretary-General reaffirms the
solidarity and support of the United Nations to the government and people of
Nigeria in their fight against terrorism, violent extremism and organized
crime," his spokesman, Stéphane Dujarric, said in a statement Sunday.
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