By Tuesday, Borno State Commissioner for Education Lawan Abba Wakilbe said 36 students and one staff member remained in captivity: 25 girls, 11 boys, and one teacher, all between the ages of 15 and 18. Eight people, including the school's vice principal, were rescued or escaped in the chaos. Police spokesman ASP Nuhu Kenneth Daso called it a terrorist attack. No group has formally claimed responsibility, but authorities suspect fighters from Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), the faction that has terrorized Nigeria's northeast for over a decade.
Witnesses said the gunmen chose Lassa's market day, when the town was crowded and security thin, firing repeatedly as they moved through the streets before reaching the school compound. Parents described children hiding under desks and diving through windows as the attackers pulled students from classrooms mid-exam. Amnesty International Nigeria said in a statement that schools "should be places of safety" and called on the government to take concrete steps to protect children and educators from armed groups operating across the north.
This is not an isolated case. Just weeks earlier, gunmen struck schools in Oyo and Borno States in a single coordinated wave, abducting 39 students and seven teachers. A recent six-year study by the Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa documented more than 79,000 people killed and nearly 35,000 abducted in terror-linked violence across Nigeria between 2019 and 2025, with Christians killed at roughly 4.4 times the rate of Muslims relative to population. Nigeria remains, by every serious count, the deadliest country on earth to bear the name of Christ.
When the Innocent Are Taken
Set the numbers down for a moment and look at what they mean. Twenty-five girls. Eleven boys. A teacher who did not run. A soldier who did not run either. These were not statistics before Monday morning — they were children answering exam questions, hoping for a mark good enough to open a door out of poverty. Now they are hostages, and their families are left to walk a road that has become, God help them, familiar in that part of the world.
My friend, there is something in the human heart that recoils at cruelty toward the young, and rightly so. Scripture does not treat children as an afterthought. The Lord Jesus took them into His arms. He did not treat a child as too small to matter, and He warned in the plainest language what awaits those who would harm one:
"But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea." (Matthew 18:6)
That is not a soft word. It is a hard word, spoken by a gentle Savior, because some things deserve a hard word. The men who stormed that schoolyard will answer to a Judge who sees every motorcycle, every bullet, every child dragged into the bush. Justice belongs to Him, and it will not miss its mark, whatever the outcome of any earthly investigation.
But hold that truth alongside another one, because the gospel never stops at judgment. The God who will judge the wicked is the same God who bends low to the frightened and the captive. The Psalms are full of that bending:
"The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit." (Psalm 34:18)
There are parents in Borno State tonight who cannot sleep, who do not know if their daughter is fed, if their son is alive. There is no cheap comfort for that. But there is a true one — the God of the Bible has never been a distant God, watching from far off while His people suffer. He entered a broken world Himself. He knows what it costs to lose a child to violence, because He gave His own Son over to a cross at the hands of wicked men, and raised Him up again on the third day.
That resurrection is the answer history keeps needing and keeps forgetting. Every headline like this one is a reminder that the world is not right, that sin has teeth, and that no amount of policy or peacekeeping alone will finally set it straight. Only the gospel reaches down to the root of the matter. Nigeria's Christians know this better than most, because they have paid for their faith in blood for years and have not stopped confessing Christ. Their endurance is itself a sermon to a comfortable world that has forgotten what it costs to believe.
Pray for those 36 students and their teacher, that they would be found and returned to their families. Pray for a nation that cannot seem to protect its own schoolchildren. And remember, whatever grief comes to your own door, that the Lord who wept at a grave in Bethany still keeps His promises to the brokenhearted.