Twenty-four girls who were abducted from a government boarding school in northwestern Nigeria last week have been released, the presidency announced.

Nigerian President Bola Tinubu on Tuesday welcomed the girls’ release and called on security forces to intensify efforts to free others still held captive.

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“I am relieved that all the 24 girls have been accounted for. Now we must put, as a matter of urgency, more boots on the ground in the vulnerable areas to avert further incidents of kidnapping. My government will offer all the assistance needed to achieve this,” Tinubu said.

The girls were seized on November 17 when armed men stormed their school in Kebbi State shortly after a military detachment left the premises.

Mass kidnappings for ransom have become common in northern Nigeria, where armed gangs target schools and rural communities, often overwhelming local security forces.

In a separate incident on Tuesday, gunmen seized 10 women and children from a village in Nigeria’s western Kwara State.

State police commissioner Ojo Adekimi said the attackers, a group of “herders”, had “shot sporadically” during the raid on Monday night on the village of Isapa, which neighbours another village where 35 people were kidnapped just a week before.

‘Need my child back’

In the largest mass abduction in recent memory, attackers raided a Catholic school on Friday in north-central Niger State and abducted more than 300 students and staff. Fifty students escaped over the weekend.

Parents of children kidnapped said they were desperate for their release.

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“My son is a small boy. He doesn’t even know how to talk,” Michael Ibrahim told the AFP news agency. His son, who is four, suffers from asthma, he said.

“We don’t know the condition in which the boy is,” said Ibrahim, adding that the abduction had so sickened his wife that she had to be taken to hospital.

Some of the children abducted are nursery-school age.

“I need my child back. I need my child back. If I had the power to bring my child back, I would do it,” another father, Sunday Isaiku, told AFP.

Four days after the St Mary’s children were taken, no group has claimed the abduction or contacted the school demanding ransom.