After 56 harrowing days in the forests of the Old Oyo National Park, the school children and teachers seized in Oyo State’s mass school abduction are free.
A joint operation by the Nigerian Army and the Nigeria Police Force, acting on precision intelligence from the Department of State Services, DSS, stormed the bandits’ hideout in the early hours of Friday, ending a captivity that had gripped the nation and drawn comparisons to Chibok episode.
At least nine of the abductors were neutralized in the firefight, security sources confirmed. The freed victims are now en route to Ibadan for a reception with Governor Seyi Makinde.
How the nightmare began
On the morning of May 15, 2026, armed men on motorcycles swept through the Yawota and Ahoro-Esiele communities of Oriire Local Government Area and struck three rural schools simultaneously, namely Baptist Nursery and Primary School, Yawota; Community Grammar School, Esiele and L.A. Primary School, Ahoro-Esinele.
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When the dust settled, 39 pupils — some as young as toddlers — and seven teachers had been herded into the bush. Investigators later linked the raiders to a Boko Haram-affiliated cell that had migrated south from the northeast, shattering the long-held belief that Nigeria’s south-west was insulated from Chibok-style mass abductions.
A teacher’s brutal death
Days into the captivity, the bandits beheaded Michael Oyedokun, a mathematics teacher at Community High School, Ahoro-Esinele — a killing Governor Makinde later confirmed and which the victim’s family begged Nigerians to stop circulating on social media. His murder turned the abduction from a hostage crisis into a national tragedy.
For weeks, Makinde insisted the captives were alive and being held inside the vast Old Oyo National Park, a rugged 2,500-square-kilometre expanse straddling Oyo and Kwara states that had become a haven for armed groups. He resisted public pressure to declare the case another Chibok, vowing: “Oyo is not Chibok. We will bring them home.”
That promise was kept on Friday.
The bigger picture
The Oyo raid was the first mass school abduction ever recorded in Nigeria’s south-west and the latest entry in a grim ledger: more than 2,500 students have been kidnapped from Nigerian schools in over 31 attacks since Boko Haram seized 276 girls from Chibok in April 2014. Many of those Chibok girls remain missing more than a decade later.
For the families of Yawota and Ahoro-Esiele, however, Friday’s rescue means the wait is over — even as the shadow of Michael Oyedokun’s death, and of a nation still unable to keep its classrooms safe, hangs heavily over the homecoming.
Crediblenewsng.com
