CHIBOK , Nigeria, April 15 (UPI) -- After a Nigerian state senator noted 135 people have been killed since Wednesday by gunmen in three separate incidents, about 200 female students were abducted Tuesday in Chibok, Borno state.
The attackers are suspected Islamist militants of Boko Haram, whose name literally means “Western education is forbidden.”
Borno state senator Ahmed Zannah noted attacks on a teacher training college in Dikwa, in which five people were killed, and attacks on two villages near the Cameroon border, in which 130 were killed.
At least 1,500 people have been killed in Nigeria’s northeastern region in 2014, Amnesty International reported. The organization blamed “an increase in attacks by Boko Haram and uncontrolled reprisals by Nigeria’s security forces” for the death toll.
The attack on the school in Chibok was confirmed by police, although it was the parents of the teenage girls who confirmed the abductions. An unidentified student said the students were sleeping when armed men burst into their dormitory and stole food from a storage area before ordering the girls to climb into trucks and a bus.
[BBC]
