Suspected Islamist insurgents abducted more than 100 female students in a night raid on a government secondary school in Nigeria’s northeast Borno state, a teacher said late on Tuesday.

The gunmen, believed to be members of the Boko Haram Islamist group which has attacked schools in the northeast before as part of their anti-government rebellion, carried off the students from the school in Chibok.

“Over 100 female students in our government secondary school at Chibok have been abducted,” said Audu Musa, who teaches in another public school in the area, around 140 kilometres south of the Borno state capital Maiduguri.

The rebels duped dozens of Nigerian schoolgirls into thinking they were soldiers come to evacuate them before abducting between 50 and 100 in their latest anti-government raid, officials said yesterday. The gunmen swooped on Chibok town in Borno state and on its nearby all-girls government secondary school, calling on the students to leave their beds in the hostel.

“When we saw these gunmen, we thought they were soldiers, they told all of us to come and walk to the gates, we followed their instructions,” 18-year-old Godiya Isaiah, who later managed to escape the abductors, said.

Terrified girls were herded at gunpoint into vehicles!

But when the armed men started ransacking the school stores and set fire to the building, the terrified girls being herded at gunpoint into vehicles realised they were being kidnapped.

“We were crying,” Isaiah said, recounting how she later jumped from a truck and ran away to hide in the bush. Other girls were packed into a bus and some pick-ups.

Shettima said at least 14 girls had managed to escape and reach safety. Borno state education commissioner Inuwa Kubo said other girls told the same story as Isaiah.

The mass abduction of schoolgirls aged between 15 and 18 has shocked Nigeria and showed how the five-year-old Boko Haram insurgency has brought lawlessness to swathes of the arid, poor northeast, killing hundreds of people in recent months.

The raid took place on the same day as a bomb attack on the edge of the capital Abuja.

The blast killed at least 75 people, the deadliest ever attack on Abuja, and raised questions about the government’s ability to protect the capital from an insurrection that risks spreading from the Islamist group’s heartland in the northeast.