Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram has abducted more than 20 women in northern Nigeria, several weeks after abducting more than 200 boarding school students in Chibok. 

Eyewitnesses told BBC News Tuesday that the women were herded into unmarked vans, then shuttled off to Borno state. The incident, which occurred in the nomadic town of Garkin Fulani, has yet to be commented upon by the Nigerian government. 

Boko Haram has been “on the rampage” over the past week, Nigerian locals say, terrorizing several northeastern villages and leaving hundreds dead. 

The group, whose name translates loosely from the Hausa language spoken widely in northern Nigeria as “Western education is sin”, has attacked schools, Christian churches, government installations and other civilian targets, since 2009.

The mass-kidnapping, which took place in April, was not the group’s first attack on a school. Just two months previously the group shot and burned to death dozens of students in an attack on a boarding school.

In a similar attack in 2013, Boko Haram terrorists murdered 50 students as they slept in their dormitories. In July of that year 29 pupils and a teacher were burned alive in another school.

This year alone more than 1,500 people have been killed, despite a state of emergency imposed in three northeast states in May last year.