Mariga, Niger State — September 13, 2026

Terrorists stormed Maburya community in Mariga Local Government Area of Niger State on Saturday night, September 12, abducting more than 100 residents in the latest mass kidnapping to strike the region, according to counter-insurgency reporter Bakatsine.

The attackers reportedly targeted residents who had already fled their homes and taken refuge in scattered locations around the community. Local sources said some people escaped into nearby hills and riverbanks as the gunmen invaded, but the attackers tracked down and abducted a number of those in hiding before continuing to move through the area in search of more residents who had escaped.

The exact number of victims remains unclear. Local sources cited by Bakatsine put the toll at more than 100, with efforts ongoing to establish victims’ identities and the precise scale of the abduction. As of this writing, there has been no official statement from the Niger State government, police, or other security agencies confirming the numbers involved.

Maburya is the latest community hit in a wave of mass abductions across Mariga LGA and surrounding areas; Gulbin Boka, Mohoro, and Shadadi have all reported recent attacks. The area’s insecurity has already produced a significant refugee outflow: Amnesty International reported last month that at least 2,000 residents of Niger State’s Dekera district fled into neighboring Benin Republic after gunmen raided mosques in the area and abducted hundreds in a single attack. Amnesty separately estimated that at least 1,100 people were abducted in rural communities across northern Nigeria between January and April 2026 alone, warning that even that figure likely understates the true scale of the crisis, and that victims are frequently subjected to torture, starvation, rape, and forced complicity in violence.

A national pattern, not an isolated incident

Maburya’s raid lands amid a broader, worsening picture of insecurity spanning multiple Nigerian regions simultaneously:

• Katsina State has seen its own mass-abduction crisis in recent days, with terrorists reportedly beheading one of more than 100 captives held since an earlier raid and sending his head to a nearby emirate — a case that, notably, also involves communities named Shadadi, underscoring how the same networks appear to be operating across the Katsina–Niger state border region.
• Benue State remains gripped by a parallel catastrophe. Amnesty International has documented more than 500,000 people displaced by gunmen attacks in the state, with camps for the displaced described as squalid and lacking adequate water, sanitation, food, and healthcare. A string of attacks has continued through 2026, including an 11-person killing in Ayilamo (Logo LGA) that also claimed the lives of four police officers, and an Easter Sunday massacre in Mbalom that killed at least 17.
• Zamfara State carries one of the country’s heaviest kidnapping burdens; SBM Intelligence data shows the state alone accounted for roughly a quarter of all kidnap victims recorded nationwide over the past year, with security forces reportedly conducting only a handful of anti-kidnap operations there in that period.
• Analysts and rights groups increasingly describe these episodes — across Niger, Katsina, Benue, Zamfara, and other northern and central states — not as isolated local incidents but as a single, interconnected national security emergency that has outpaced the government’s response capacity.

A government seen as absent

The renewed Maburya attack comes as President Bola Tinubu remains out of the country on a three-week personal leave in Europe, having departed Nigeria on August 30 with London as his first stop before travelling on to Paris. The Presidency has said Tinubu is expected to return only at the end of his leave to resume official engagements ahead of the 2027 elections. His extended absence during an intensifying wave of mass-casualty and mass-abduction attacks has drawn sharp criticism from opposition figures, including 2027 presidential candidate Peter Obi, who has argued that the President should be focused on Nigeria’s security and economic crises rather than travelling abroad.

Amnesty International has directly called on “Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu and his government” to urgently address the country’s abduction crisis, describing the federal response as inadequate given the scale and frequency of attacks. Critics point to a security apparatus that, despite a 2025 federal defence and security budget of roughly ₦6.57 trillion, has been unable to prevent recurring mass abductions in the same clusters of communities — Mariga, Shadadi, Zamfara, and Benue among them — over sustained periods, with military and police responses frequently arriving only after attackers have already withdrawn with their captives.

No security agency had issued a public response to the Maburya attack as of the time of this report, and the fate of the more than 100 people reportedly abducted remains unknown.