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ABUJA. — Boko Haram yesterday claimed the abduction of hundreds of schoolgirls in northern Nigeria that has triggered international outrage, threatening to sell them as “slaves”. “I abducted your girls,” the Islamist group’s leader Abubakar Shekau said in the 57-minute video obtained by AFP, referring to the 276 students kidnapped from their boarding school in Chibok, Borno state, three weeks ago.
Fifty-three of the girls managed to escape from the militants but 223 were still being held, state police said last Friday.
Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan and his administration have been under mounting pressure to act since gunmen stormed the girls’ school on April 14, forcing them from their dormitories onto truck and driving them into the bush.
President Jonathan pledged in his first public comments on the abduction on Sunday evening that the government would find the girls and return them to their families.
“This is a trying time for this country . . . it is painful,” he said, adding that he had sought help from foreign powers, including the United States, to help Nigeria tackle its security challenges.
In the latest video, Shekau is seen dressed in combat fatigues standing in front of an armoured personnel carrier and two pick-up trucks mounted with sub-machine guns.
For the first 14 minutes, he takes a swipe at democracy, Western education, efforts for Muslims and Christians to live in peace and rails against non-believers in Islam.
“I abducted a girl at a Western education school and you are disturbed. I said Western education should end. Western education should end. Girls, you should go and get married,” he said.
“I will repeat this: Western education should fold up. I abducted your girls.” “I will sell them in the market, by Allah,” Shekau said, claiming his group was holding the girls as “slaves”.
“I will marry off a woman at the age of 12. I will marry off a girl at the age of nine,” he said elsewhere in the video.
Unconfirmed reports from local leaders in Chibok suggested that the girls had been taken across Nigeria’s borders with Chad and Cameroon and sold as brides for as little as US$12.
Meanwhile, a Nigerian woman who led a protest demanding the release of the kidnapped schoolgirls was arrested yesterday after meeting Nigeria’s First Lady Patience Jonathan, activists said.
The first lady’s office has denied reports that she ordered the arrest.
The detained woman, Naomi Mutah, was part of a group who met with the First Lady late Sunday to discuss the abduction of more than 200 girls from Chibok in northeastern Borno state on April 14.
A group called Bring Back Our Girls has organised a series of protests around the country to demand that the government and military do more to rescue the hostages.
Protest organiser Hadiza Bala Usman told AFP that Mutah was arrested at around 3:00 am (0200 GMT) at the presidential villa because she falsely identified herself as a mother of one of the hostages.
“She was told that she made a false claim of being a mother of the Chibok girls whereas she is not,” Usman told AFP. Mutah, who is from Chibok and helped lead protests in Abuja last week, was in fact representing a group of mothers who could not make it to Abuja for the meeting with the First Lady, according to Usman. — AFP.
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