Male staff were blindfolded and chained, the headteacher added as details of the ordeal that shook the country finally emerged.
The students, whose rescue was announced on Friday, had been seized from three schools in southwestern Oyo state and held captive for nearly two months, in an attack blamed on jihadists.
Such mass kidnappings have rocked Nigeria before but the Oyo attack marked a rare assault in the country’s typically safer southwest.
Rachael Alamu, head of one of the schools, gave a moving account of the abductees’ experience during 56 days in captivity, during which they were shunted from one section of the forest to another, with little food.
“Some of the children were beaten,” Alamu told reporters at the Oyo government offices, where the military formally handed over the children and their teachers on Monday.
She said the youngest children had their mouths bound with pieces of “cloth, and (the captors) beat them very well”.
“The men had it worse, more than us. They were blindfolded, handcuffed and chained” around the legs, Alamu added.
– Trekking through forest hideouts –
The group was moved around the forest to avoid detection from security forces.
“We had to move from one point to another, that was the major problem we had. When the place is discovered, we had to move” — forced to walk for up to four hours, she said.
Two male teachers were killed, one during the initial attack and a second one while in captivity, according to the head teacher and the governor of Oyo State, Seyi Makinde.
The children and staff were rescued following what the army called “carefully planned and executed” operations alongside intelligence agencies, police and local vigilante groups.
Five security personnel, including vigilante members,were killed during the operation, Makinde said.
Nigeria has been fighting a jihadist conflict that over the years has seen armed Islamist groups spread and fracture outside their strongholds in the northeast.
But the attack in Oyo state sent shockwaves through a country where many had long written off such violence as a problem confined to the north.
The kidnapping, in Oyo’s Oriire local government area, was blamed by President Bola Tinubu on militants from Ansaru, a Boko Haram splinter group known to operate in central Nigeria, extending into the southwest.
