Hundreds of kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls freed BBC News

A group of nearly 300 girls who were kidnapped from a school in northwestern 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 northeastern 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.