195 Students Escape Death As Gunmen Raze Staff Residence At Girls’ School

Gunmen in northern Nigeria set fire to a staff residential building at a girls’ secondary school on Sunday but the 195 students sleeping in their nearby dormitories were unharmed, police and a teacher said. The attack in Bauchi state came less than a week after Boko Haram Islamists kidnapped 129 teenage schoolgirls from the Chibok area of Borno state in the northeast. Forty-four of those girls have since escaped. “At about 2:30 am (0130 GMT), unknown gunmen carried out coordinated attacks in Yana town,” Bauchi’s police spokesman Haruna Mohammed said. They burnt “several buildings including a staff quarters of a girls’ secondary school, an eight-block police quarters, a sharia (Islamic law) court and the local government secretariat,” he told AFP. Mohammed said it was not clear who carried out the attack and provided no details on casualties. Boko Haram, an extremist group fighting to create a strict Islamic state in northern Nigeria, has attacked Bauchi many times in an insurgency that has killed thousands si