Ten days ago, Fatima was with her best friend in Dapchi, but now she doesn’t know where she is[/caption]
The kidnapping of 110 girls from a school in the north-eastern Nigerian town of Dapchi bears striking similarities to the 2014 abduction of 276 schoolgirls from Chibok – right down to the contradictory information from the authorities.
The BBC’s Stephanie Hegarty went to the town to visit the school and meet families of those missing children.
The grounds of the boarding school in Dapchi town are eerily quiet. Instead of the high-pitched chatter of 900 schoolgirls, there’s only the bleating of goats as they wander through empty classrooms. Thirteen-year-old Fatima Awaal is walking down the dusty path. She walks past a littering of rubber sandals, lost by girls as they ran away on Monday 19 February. When the militants from the Boko Haram Islamist group attacked, she was in her boarding house with her best friend Zara. They were just about to have dinner when they heard the gunshots. “One of our teachers told us to come out,” she said “And that’s when we saw the gunfire shooting through the sky.” The militants were coming from the far end of the compound, firing in the air.
‘My heart is breaking’
Zara’s home is a big mud-brick building in a large compound close to the school. Her father Yussuf is a farmer and community leader. He told us that on the night of the attack, the family heard gunshots from the school and the sound of girls screaming. “I ran over there to get my daughter,” he said. “I was about to climb the fence when I saw the men shooting.”

‘The children of poor men’
Zara is just one of 110 girls who were taken that night. All around the small town of Dapchi, families are grieving. Like the Manugalawans. Eighteen-year-old Hafsat was in school that night when she heard the gunshots, grabbed her 15-year-old sister Hauwa, and ran. “The Boko Haram man was shouting at us to stop, he said he would shoot but we kept running,” she said. Hafsat paid the words no heed. They ran towards a perimeter fence and she told her younger sister to climb first. But when she got to the other side, Hauwa was gone.
