Hundreds of kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls freed – BBC News

A group of nearly 300 girls who were kidnapped from a school in north-western Nigeria last week have been released, a local official says. The girls were abducted by gunmen from their boarding school in Jangebe, Zamfara state, on Friday and taken to a forest, police said. The state’s governor said on Tuesday that the group had been freed and the girls were now safe. The 2014 kidnap of 276 schoolgirls in the north-eastern town of Chibok by Islamist militants Boko Haram brought global attention to the scourge of raids on schools in Nigeria, but a surge in recent attacks is suspected to be the work of criminal gangs.