The President of Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), Niger State Chapter Reverend Bulus Dauwa Yohanna, on Saturday, 22 November, 2025 disclosed that 315 students and teachers were kidnapped in the country’s second school abduction in a week.
Yohanna gave a new tally from the previous day’s school abduction, saying 315 students and teachers had been seized by unknown attackers.
Previous reports had spoken of 215 schoolchildren.
The incident at St. Mary’s co-education school in Niger state comes on the heels of another attack in neigboring Kebbi state on Monday, 17 November, 2025, where 25 girls were abducted from a secondary school.
The abduction in Niger state is on the same scale as that in northeastern Borno state more than a decade ago, when nearly 300 girls in the town of Chibok were kidnapped by jihadis from the Boko Haram group.
Some of those girls remain missing.
Reverend Yohanna, who is also the Catholic Bishop of Kontagora Diocese, to which the school belongs, gave the revised toll after visiting St Mary’s.
“After we left the school at Papiri, we decided to make calls, do verification exercise and do further inquiries on those we had thought escaped successfully, only to discover that 88 more students were also captured after they tried to escape,” he said in a statement.
“This now makes it 303 students (male and female) including 12 teachers (4 females and 8 males) bringing the total to number of abducted persons to 315,” he said.
The students were said to range in age from 10 to 18.
The Federal Government has so far not commented on the number of students and teachers abducted.
The number of children kidnapped from St. Mary’s is almost half of the school’s 629 students.
The Niger State government has closed many schools, as have authorities in the nearby states of Katsina and Plateau.
