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The state government says there were about 200 children in the school when it was attacked by motorbike gunmen.
An armed gang abducted dozens of students at an Islamic school in the north-central Niger state on Sunday, police and state government officials said.
There were about 200 children at the school at the time of Sunday’s attack, the Nigerian state government said on Twitter, adding that “an unconfirmed number” had been taken.
The kidnapping released 14 students from a university in northwestern Nigeria and occurred one day after 40 days in captivity.
A Nigerian state police spokesman said in a statement that army men on motorcycles attacked the town of Tegina, in the local government area of Rafi state, on Sunday at around 15:00 (14:00 GMT).
He said the attackers were “shooting indiscriminately and kidnapping an as yet unknown number of children at the Salihu Tanko Islamic school.” A person was shot dead in the attack and a second person was seriously injured, a state governor’s spokesman said.
Armed groups carrying out the kidnapping of the rescue have been blamed for numerous raids on schools and universities in northern Nigeria in recent months and more than 700 students have been kidnapped as a rescue since December.
School owner Abubakar Tegina told Reuters in a telephone interview that he had witnessed the attack.
“I personally saw 20-25 motorcycles with armed people. They went into the school and went with about 150 or more students, ”said Tegina, who lives about 150 meters from the school.
“We can’t be specific because most of them didn’t report to the school at the time,” he said, when asked for more details about the number taken.
Tegina said there are approximately 300 students between the ages of seven and 15 who live at home and teach classes only on site.
One of the school officials who asked not to be named told the AFP news agency that the attackers had initially taken more than 100 children “but then sent them to the little ones, aged between four and 12”.
The state government, through a number of tweets, said the attackers had released 11 students who were “too small and could not walk very far”.
Most of the students kidnapped in recent months have been taken from boarding schools.
Armed gangs have been terrorizing people by stealing villages in northwestern and central Nigeria, stealing cattle and kidnapping people in exchange for a ransom.
On April 20, gunmen known locally as “bandits” entered Greenfield University in northwestern Nigeria and kidnapped about 20 students, killing one employee in the process.
A few days later five students were executed and forced by their families and the government to pay the ransom about 14 students were released on Saturday.
The local press said the families had paid 180 million naira ($ 440,000) for their release.
The gangs of criminals maintain camps in the Rugu forest, located in Zamfara, Katsina, Kaduna and Niger states.
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