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Gunmen kidnapped more than 200 pupils during a raid on a school in northwest Nigeria, in one of the country’s largest mass abductions in three years.

Local government officials in Kaduna State confirmed the kidnapping at the GSS Kuriga school on Thursday. However, they gave no figures as they said they were still working out how many children had been abducted.

Sani Abdullahi, one of the teachers at the school said staff managed to escape with many students when the gunmen, known locally as bandits, attacked. He told local officials that 187 pupils had been snatched from the main school along with another 100 from the school’s primary classes.

“Early in the morning, before we got up, we heard gunshots from bandits, before we knew it, they had gathered up the children,” another resident Musa Mohammed told AFP.

“We are pleading to the government, all of us are pleading, they should please help us with security.”

Thursday’s kidnapping comes almost ten years after Boko Haram jihadists triggered an international outcry by kidnapping more than 250 schoolgirls from Chibok in Nigeria’s northeast.

Some of those girls are still missing.