Four mosques. One prayer window. By the time anyone outside Borgu could confirm what had happened, the attackers were already gone, and days later, the state still can't say how many people they took.

The abductions hit Dekara, Kpenya, Sabon-Gida and Gidan-Zana, four communities inside Borgu local government area of Niger State, during last Friday's Juma'at prayer [S1]. Coordinating a raid across four separate mosques in the same prayer window means the attackers had already mapped which mosques would be full and moved between them faster than any single security response could plausibly track.

Witnesses in two of the affected villages described armed men carrying guns and machetes moving through as prayers were underway, and said police had not confirmed the basic details of the attack days after it happened [S3]. A security response still catching up to eyewitness accounts nearly a week later is not failing at the margins. It is failing at the starting point: knowing what happened.