Unidentified gunmen seized more than 300 girls in a nighttime raid on a school in northwest Nigeria on Friday and are believed to be holding some of them in a forest, police said.
It was the second such kidnapping in little over a week in a region increasingly targeted by militants and criminal gangs. There was no immediate claim of responsibility.
Police in Zamfara state said they had begun search-and-rescue operations with the army to find the "armed bandits" who took the 317 girls from the Government Girls Science Secondary School in the town of Jangebe.
"There's information that they were moved to a neighbouring forest, and we are tracing and exercising caution and care," Zamfara police commissioner Abutu Yaro told a news conference.
He did not say whether those possibly moved to the forest included all of them.