a presidential spokesman said Sunday, after 100 were freed earlier this month. "Another 130 abducted Niger state pupils released, none left in captivity," Sunday Dare said in a post on X.  In late November, hundreds of students and staff were kidnapped from St Mary's co-educational boarding school in north-central Niger state. The attack came as the country buckled under a wave of mass abductions reminiscent of the infamous 2014 Boko Haram kidnapping of schoolgirls in the town of Chibok. The west African country suffers from multiple interlinked security concerns, from jihadists in the northeast to armed "bandit" gangs in the northwest. The exact number taken from St Mary's has been unclear throughout the ordeal.

Initially, the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) said 315 students and staff were unaccounted for after the attack in the rural hamlet of Papiri. Around 50 of them escaped immediately afterwards, and on December 7 the government secured the release of around 100. That would leave about 165 thought to be still in captivity before Sunday's announcement that 130 were rescued. But a UN source told AFP that all those taken appeared to have been released -- as dozens thought to have been kidnapped had in fact managed to run off during the attack, and make their way home. The accounting has been complicated because the children's homes are scattered across swathes of rural Nigeria, sometimes requiring three or four hours of travel by motorbike to reach their remote villages, the source said. The source told AFP that "the remaining set of girls/secondary school students will be taken to Minna", the capital of Niger state, on Monday. "We'll have to still do final verification," Daniel Atori, a spokesman for CAN in Niger state, told AFP. (Bssnews)