admin
Maiduguri — Suspected Boko Haram gunmen kidnapped eight girls aged 12 to 15 from a village near one of their strongholds in northeast Nigeria overnight, police and residents said yesterday.“They were many, and all of them carried guns. They came in two vehicles painted in army colour. They started shooting in our village,” said Lazarus Musa, a resident of Warabe, where the attack happened.
A police source, who could not be named, said the girls were taken away on trucks, along with looted livestock and food.
The Islamist rebels are still holding more than 200 girls they abducted from a secondary school on April 14.
Meanwhile, Britain’s Foreign Minister William Hague condemned the kidnapping three weeks ago of hundreds of schoolgirls in Nigeria as “disgusting”, and said London was offering “practical help”.
“The actions of Boko Haram in using girls as the spoils of war, the spoils of terrorism is disgusting, it is immoral,” Hague said in Vienna, where he was attending a meeting of the Council of Europe.
“It should show everybody across the world that they should not give any support to such a vile organisation,” he added.
Hague said Britain was offering “practical help” to Nigeria, but did not expand further. He said the matter had first and foremost to be dealt with by the Nigerian authorities. Anger and frustration have escalated in Nigeria at the government’s failure to find the girls, with calls now mounting for the United States to help find and free the schoolgirls.
A total 276 students were kidnapped from their boarding school in Chibok, northern Nigeria. Several managed to escape but over 220 girls were still being held, according to police.
In a video obtained by AFP on Monday, the Islamist militant group Boko Haram claimed the April 14 abduction and said it was holding the girls as “slaves,” sparking international outrage.
Meanwhile, Niger Delta gunmen have released two Nigerians they kidnapped two days ago, but kept three Dutch nationals who were abducted at the same time, one of those freed tweeted yesterday. Environmental activist Sunny Ofehe tweeted that he and another kidnap victim were “released in the creek of Niger Delta last night by gun men! The other 3 colleagues are yet to be freed”.
In an interview with Dutch television, Amsterdam-based Nigerian activist Ofehe said the group was seized after armed men in a dinghy approached their boat, shooting out its motor. The gunmen yelled “Keep your faces down, if you make a single sound, we will shoot you”, Ofehe said. — AFP
Online Reporter