More Boko Haram abductees freed in Nigeria

More Boko Haram abductees freed in Nigeria

By Dan Wooding, Founder of ASSIST News Service, who was born in Nigeria

NIGERIA (ANS – May 20, 2016) -- The Nigerian army says it has freed 97 women and girls from Boko Haram, including one of the more than 200 girls abducted from Chibok school.

However, the BBC says that Chibok campaigners say that while the girl in question was a student at the school, she was actually kidnapped from her home elsewhere.

This comes days after the first of the Chibok girls, Amina Ali Nkeki, and her four-month-old baby, was freed.

The Islamist militant group has seized thousands of women and girls in northern Nigeria, rights groups say.

But it was the abduction of the girls from Chibok that gained international attention through the #BringBackOurGirls campaign, which was supported by US First Lady Michelle Obama and Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai.

“The army has made several mistakes in its statements about the Chibok girls - in its initial statement after the first girl was found on Wednesday, it used the wrong name,” said the BBC. “It has claimed to have freed more than 100 of them before later backtracking.

“In all, 218 girls remain missing since they were seized from Chibok secondary school in Borno state, north-eastern Nigeria, in April 2014.”

The girl rescued earlier this week told a Chibok community leader that six of the kidnapped girls had died but the rest were still in the Sambisa forest where she was found.

In a statement, army spokesman Col. Sani Usman said the 97 women and girls had been found on Thursday in the Demboa area of Borno, during an operation in which 35 militants were killed.

“Among those rescued is a girl believed to be one of the Chibok Government Secondary School girls that were abducted on 14 April 2014,” he said.

However, the #BringBackOurGirls group said it had established that the rescued girl had been abducted from her home in Madagali, in neighboring Adamawa state.

Earlier on Thursday (May 19, 2016), the first Chibok girl found was flown to the capital Abuja to meet with President Muhammadu Buhari, a fierce opponent of Boko Haram who once tried to assassinate him.

Mr Buhari said he was delighted she was back and vowed to help her resume her education.

“But my feelings are tinged with deep sadness at the horrors the young girl has had to go through at such an early stage in her life,” he added.

She was found by an army-backed vigilante group in the huge Sambisa Forest, close to the border with Cameroon, along with her four-month-old baby.

She was with a suspected member of Boko Haram who claimed to be her husband.

During the April 2014 attack, Boko Haram gunmen arrived in Chibok at night and raided the school dormitories, loading 276 girls on to trucks.

More than 50 managed to escape within hours, mostly by jumping off the trucks and running into roadside bushes, leaving 219 in the blood-stained hands of Boko Haram.

Photo captions: 1) Mother of the missing schoolgirl who had been found, 2) The first rescued Chibok girl showed her child to President Buhari. 3) Some of the missing Chibok schoolgirls. 3) Nigerian soldier stands guard at the Chibok school from where the schoolgirls were abducted. 4) Dan Wooding as a baby being held by his mother, Anne Wooding at Vom Christian Hospital in Nigeria.

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About the writer: Dan Wooding, 75, is an award-winning winning author, broadcaster and journalist who was born in Nigeria of British missionary parents, and is now living in Southern California with his wife Norma, to whom he has been married for nearly 53 years. They have two sons, Andrew and Peter, and six grandchildren, who all live in the UK. Dan is the founder and international director of the ASSIST News Service (ANS), and the author or co-author of some 45 books. Dan has a radio show and two TV shows, all based in Southern California. Before moving to America, he had previously been a senior reporter with two of two of Great Britain’s top-circulation newspapers, as well as an interviewer for BBC Radio in London, England.

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