Nigeria: 600 Abducted From Mosque, Tinubu Orders Rescue
An armed group attacked a mosque and villages in Nigeria's Niger state; residents say around 600 people were seized. President Bola Tinubu has ordered a joint rescue operation by security services.
An armed group attacked a mosque in the Dakera settlement and the nearby villages of Gidan Zana and Sabon Gida on August 21, in the Borgu local government area of Niger state, in north central Nigeria. The attack hit as worshippers were gathering for Friday prayers, which partly explains why, according to residents, so many of those seized were women, children and elderly people who happened to be in or around the mosque at the time. Residents say around 600 people were abducted in the raid, including mothers carrying infants.
The figure of 600 abducted has not been independently verified. Reuters said it was unable to confirm the number on its own, but noted that if it holds up, this would rank among the largest and most brazen mass abductions in Nigeria in recent years.
Thirty people were killed in the attack and buried on Sunday. At least 2,000 residents fled across the border into neighboring Benin to escape the violence that swept through that part of Borgu.
Footage shows captives held in the forest
The clearest evidence of the scale of the abduction surfaced on social media. A video posted on Facebook and WhatsApp showed a large group of captives under armed guard in a wooded area, and residents said they recognized relatives among them. Children can be heard crying in the footage, while an armed man addresses the families and urges them to identify their relatives among the captives.
That footage is what led the public to describe the Borgu attack as one of the largest abductions in Nigeria’s recent history, even though no official, confirmed list of victims exists yet. It also remains unclear whether everyone seen in the footage was taken in a single attack or gathered from several separate raids, since multiple communities in Borgu came under attack at the same time.
Tinubu orders a joint operation
President Bola Tinubu on Tuesday, August 25, ordered the armed forces, the police, the State Security Service and other security and intelligence agencies to launch a joint rescue operation. It was the presidency’s first official response to the attack.
“Terror will not intimidate Nigeria,” Tinubu said in a statement, adding that the state would defend its citizens, protect communities and preserve the sanctity of human life.
Tinubu asked the heads of the security services to report to him regularly until the fate of everyone abducted is established. With that, the presidency has publicly committed not just to pursuing the attackers but to determining the exact number of victims and compiling a list of the missing.
Officials in Niger state, however, are more cautious about the figures circulating online. Obed Nana, the state’s information commissioner, told Reuters that authorities are working to verify how many people are actually missing.
“I don’t want to be too speculative on that, because you know how sensitive such information can be,” Nana said.
No group has claimed responsibility
No armed group has so far claimed responsibility for the attack on Dakera and the surrounding villages. Mass abductions for ransom are common in northwest and north central Nigeria, where armed gangs raid villages, schools and roads, then hold hostages for weeks or months while negotiating payment.
The region has been the site of major rescue operations before. Nigerian security services said in early August that they had freed hundreds of people from several separate kidnappings, including victims pulled out of forested terrain in the same Niger state. Those operations show the authorities have the capacity to run large rescue missions, but armed groups keep generating fresh hostage crises faster than the source of the violence can be shut down.
The scale of this attack makes any resolution harder still. If the figure of about 600 abducted holds up, a column of captives moving through dense, hard to reach terrain poses a serious logistical challenge for both the kidnappers and any force trying to free them. Any operation would have to avoid putting at risk the civilians surrounded by armed guards, especially the children and the elderly among them.
While the count of the missing is still being checked, families in Borgu are still waiting for word on their relatives. Nigerian authorities have not given a timeline for the first results of the search, nor said when Tinubu will receive his first report from the services he tasked with carrying it out.
