Nigeria’s Mass Kidnapping Crisis Deepens as Catholic School Raid Exposes Expanding Militant Networks

More than 250 girls aged 10 to 18 from St Mary’s Catholic School in Papiri, Niger State, remain missing after one of Nigeria’s largest school kidnappings in years. The attack has intensified fears for Christian institutions in a region where criminal gangs, herder militias and jihadist networks increasingly overlap.

Gunmen entered St Mary’s before dawn last Friday and abducted 303 students and 12 staff members. Eyewitnesses told local media the attackers arrived in large numbers on motorcycles, opened fire and removed hostages using bikes and a snatched vehicle. The stolen car later broke down, allowing some children to escape. Fifty pupils eventually fled, but more than two hundred remain unaccounted for.

Christian leaders described chaotic scenes as parents tried to confirm which children were missing. Bulus Dauwa Yohanna of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) said: “We were able to ascertain this [how many students were missing] when we decided to contact and visit some parents.” Another CAN representative said: “I have just got back to the village this night...to assure them that we are working with the government and security agencies.”

The raid followed another mass abduction days earlier. Niger State authorities closed all schools, warning that attackers had intimate knowledge of the terrain and used established bush routes to escape.

According to Inkstick, a Washington based foreign policy outlet that monitors African security, Nigeria recorded 3 495 kidnappings in 582 incidents between mid-2022 and mid-2023. Inkstick links this level of kidnappings to the fusion of a nationwide criminal economy and Islamic fundamentalism driven by weak intelligence capacity. As an analyst with the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED),an independent, impartial conflict monitor providing real time data and analysis for violent conflict and protests, explained: “There’s just a lot of money to be made in this enterprise.”

The Papiri region has long struggled with armed herder militias, many from Fulani communities affected by land disputes and state neglect. Research by the French Foundation for Strategic Research, a think tank on international security and defence issues, notes that some Fulani have been drawn into jihadist movements spreading from Mali and Burkina Faso. ACLED has tracked the southward advance of Islamic State Sahel Province and al Qaeda aligned groups toward the Nigeria-Benin frontier, where hybrid cells mix banditry with ideological Islamic violence.

This ideological dimension has been visible in assaults on Christian communities. Christianity Today recorded testimonies where attackers: “chanting ‘Allahu Akbar’” struck Christian villages, while another interviewee said: “I am yet to find any Muslim community where people have been sacked [destroyed], and others came in to occupy those places.”

The precedent remains the 2014 Chibok abduction of 276 schoolgirls by Boko Haram, most of them Christian. A US congressional hearing summarised the group as: “[A] vicious terrorist group...They target Christians, moderate Muslims as well. They kill in the name of religion.”

The St Mary’s kidnapping shares the same profile: a night attack on a rural Christian boarding school. Officials believe ransom is the primary motive, yet the choice of a Catholic institution fits a wider pattern of Christian schools being among the most vulnerable targets.

Security forces and local hunters are pursuing the abductors, but dense forest, weak intelligence and porous borders complicate rescue efforts. Kidnapping for ransom remains profitable. Jihadist influence continues to expand from the Sahel into Nigeria’s north-west. Armed pastoralist groups remain entangled in local grievances. Christian schools sit at the centre of these intersecting pressures, creating a widening zone of insecurity in which children remain among the most exposed.