By Gbenga Akingbule and Joe Parkinson Updated Feb. 21, 2018
MAIDUGURI, Nigeria—Dozens of schoolgirls remained missing two days after a jihadist raid on a boarding school in northeastern Nigeria raised fears of a repeat of the mass kidnapping in Chibok in 2014.
A convoy of fighters in machine-gun-mounted trucks from the Boko Haram Islamist insurgency rolled into the Government Girls Science Technical College in the town of Dapchi, Yobe state, on Monday evening, local officials and Western diplomats said.
Police officers and teachers initially said they believed the 800-member student body was safe after fleeing to their homes and nearby villages. But dozens still remained unaccounted for, Yobe state police commissioner Summonu Abdulmalik said.
Nigeria’s government confirmed late Wednesday that the attackers were from the militant group that also carried out the Chibok raid.
The Nigerian military said it saved “some of the girls from the terrorists who abducted them” in an operation, without giving figures. Residents of Dapchi reached by telephone in Dapchi, a remote and dust-caked village less than 50 miles from Nigeria’s border with Niger, said they were celebrating the return of some of the girls, adding that not all had returned home.
President Muhammadu Buhari said on Twitter that he had dispatched his defense minister to Yobe and directed military and police “to mobilize immediately to ensure that all the missing girls…are found.”
“I share the anguish of all the parents and guardians of the girls that remain unaccounted for,” he added.
Anxiety over the fate of the Dapchi students has rekindled memories of the seizure of the 276 students in Chibok, around 170 miles west of the town.
That abduction prompted millions of Twitter users—including Michelle Obama, actress Angelina Jolie and Pope Francis —to tweet #BringBackOurGirls, making the schoolgirls a touchstone of Nigeria’s long war with the Islamist insurgency.
Between October 2016 and May 2017, the group freed 103 of the girls in exchange for five imprisoned fighters and €3 million ($3.7 million), Nigerian officials said.
The Chibok students—who have endured almost four years of beatings, starvation, airstrikes, hard labor and forced adherence to Boko Haram’s cause—are the face of the overall suffering in northeastern Nigeria. More than 31,000 people have died in the decadelong war and two million people have been forced from their homes.
Some of the Chibok girls gathered in Abuja in May 2017 after gaining their freedom. PHOTO: AFP/GETTY IMAGES
In a New Year’s address, Mr. Buhari reiterated his assessment that Boko Haram had been defeated after government forces pushed the militants from territory the size of Belgium into remote hide-outs along the borders with Cameroon and Chad.
“Isolated attacks still occur, but even the best-policed countries cannot prevent determined criminals from committing terrible acts of terror as we have seen during the past years in Europe, Asia, Middle East, elsewhere in Africa and in America,” Mr. Buhari said.
The jihadists have increased their attacks in the past year, sending more than 90 children strapped with bombs into public places. Armed convoys still regularly launch incursions into town and villages. Kidnappings have continued and more people have fled.
Police officials in Yobe on Wednesday said the militants looted the school for food and supplies.
Mustapha Bukar, the school’s vice principal, said he hoped the rest of the girls would be found in surrounding villages.
Write to Joe Parkinson at joe.parkinson@wsj.com
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