At least 39 schoolchildren and six teachers kidnapped by gunmen in Nigeria’s southwestern \u200bOyo State nearly two months ago \u200chave been rescued by security forces, a presidential spokesperson said on Friday.<\/p>\n
Nigeria school kidnappings in southwest stokes fears of widening insecurity.<\/p>\n
An empty street in the Esinle community, where pupils and teachers were abducted in a large-scale school attack, in Oyo State, Nigeria, June 2, 2026.<\/p>\n
The students and teachers \u200bwere abducted on May 15 \u200bwhen armed men targeted multiple schools in \u2060Oyo’s Oriire district.
\nOyo officials had said \u200bone of the abducted teachers was killed \u200bin captivity.<\/p>\n
In a statement, presidential spokesperson Bayo Onanuga said eight kidnappers were arrested and are in custody.<\/p>\n
The \u200bstatement quoted President Bola Tinubu saying \u200bhis government “will get justice for these children and \u200ctheir \u2060teachers” and the family of the teacher “who the terrorists gruesomely murdered.”<\/p>\n
Mass kidnappings by armed groups have become a major security \u200bchallenge in \u200bNigeria in \u2060recent years, with criminal gangs exploiting weak security and porous \u200bborders to target travelers, students \u200band \u2060rural communities for cash and in-kind payments.<\/p>\n
Schools are often targeted, although such attacks are \u2060less \u200bfrequent in the southwest \u200bof the country.<\/p>\n
–Reuters–<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":15763,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"news-type":[78,26],"class_list":["post-39443","news","type-news","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","news-type-featured","news-type-general_news","entry"],"acf":{"short_description":"","published_date":"","news_description":"Schoolchildren and six teachers \u200chave been rescued","form_embed":"","author":"","image_caption":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/39443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/news"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/39443\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39444,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/39443\/revisions\/39444"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15763"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"news-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-type?post=39443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}