DSS Arrests Five Arms Couriers Linked to Papiri School Kidnapping

Three hundred students and staff were taken from a school in November 2025. Six months later, the DSS is dismantling the weapons network that made it possible.

The Department of State Services has arrested five suspected arms couriers in connection with the November 2025 attack on St. Mary's Catholic School in Papiri, Niger State, one of the most shocking mass kidnappings in recent Nigerian history. Two of the five suspects are foreign nationals from the Niger Republic. The arrests were made through a series of intelligence-led operations, and a significant cache of weapons was recovered in the process.

The recovered arsenal included 15 AK-103 rifles, 15 magazines, and 1,434 rounds of 7.62mm live ammunition. These were not weapons being moved for storage. They were in transit, headed toward active use.

The first arrests came on the Zaria-Kaduna Highway, where operatives intercepted Yusuf Mohammed, also known as Bature, and his associate Mubarak Ibrahim. Yusuf Mohammed is allegedly on the wanted list of Boko Haram, formally known as Jama'atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda'awati wal-Jihad. According to TVC News, the two were allegedly en route to collect a weapons shipment for terrorist leaders when they were stopped.

A blue car was used to transport the weapons and ammunition.

A follow-up operation led to the arrest of Goni Ibrahim, an international arms courier from the Diffa Region of the Niger Republic, and his alleged collaborator Tukur Sani. The Diffa Region sits along Niger's southern border with Nigeria, and has long been identified as a corridor for cross-border arms movement feeding insurgent and bandit networks in Nigeria's northwest and northeast.

The transnational dimension of this case deserves attention. When foreign nationals are arrested inside Nigeria carrying weapons linked to a school kidnapping, it confirms what security analysts have been saying for years: the arms supply chains enabling attacks on Nigerian civilians do not begin and end within Nigerian borders. They stretch across the Sahel, moving through porous frontier zones that no single country can police alone.

Days after those arrests, agents detained a fifth suspect in Yauri, Kebbi State. Alhaji Adamu, also known as Gado Banufe, is accused of being a major weapons supplier to criminal networks operating along the Kebbi axis. His arrest suggests the DSS operation did not stop at the immediate Papiri connection but followed the network outward to its wider supply structure.

That approach matters. Arresting a courier is useful. Tracing the courier back to the supplier, and the supplier back to the network, is what actually degrades a trafficking operation.

The St. Mary's Papiri kidnapping was one of those events that briefly shocked the nation and then, as tends to happen, faded from the headlines while the families of 300 students and staff continued to live with the consequences. These arrests will not undo that. But they represent something the affected families have every right to expect: evidence that the state is still working, still following the trail, and still treating what happened in Papiri as a crime that demands accountability.

Five suspects are in DSS custody. The weapons are off the road. The investigation is ongoing.

The network that armed the attack on a school full of children did not disappear when the kidnapping ended. The DSS is making sure it knows that.