Boko Haram: Abducted school girls jump to 234

The Custodian April 21, 2014

The number of secondary school girls still under Boko Haram captivity is more than the figure widely circulated.

There are 234 of them missing from the northeast Nigerian girls secondary school attacked last week by the Islamic extremists, significantly more than the 85 reported by education officials.

Parents of the girls gave the revised figure to Governor Kashim Shettima today when he came on a visit to Chibok, along with a military escort, to sympathise with them.

The aggrieved parents told the governor that officials would not listen to them when they drew up their list of names of missing children and the total reached 234.

The discrepancy in the figures could not immediately be resolved, according to AP.

Security officials had warned Gov. Kashim Shettima that it was too dangerous for him to drive to Chibok, 130 kilometers (80 miles) from Maiduguri, the Borno state capital and birthplace of the Boko Haram terrorist network blamed for the abductions.

Borno state education commission Musa Inuwo Kubo and the principal of the Chibok Government Girls Secondary School had initially said that 129 science students were at the school to write a physics exam when the abductors struck, after midnight on April 14.

Twenty-eight pupils escaped from their captors between Tuesday and Friday. Then another 16 were found to be day scholars who had returned to their homes in Chibok before the attack. That left 85 missing students, according to school officials.

This latest confusion comes after the military had reported last week that all but eight of those abducted had been rescued — but then retracted the claim the following day.

Reports by military high command that soldiers were in “hot pursuit” of the abductors have been mere stunts.

None of the girls, aged between 16 and 18 have been rescued.

Parents and other town residents who carried out a search of their own and even chased the Boko Haram gunmen to Sambisa Forest said they did not meet a single Nigerian soldier on the way.

Boko Haram has been abducting some girls and young women in attacks on schools, villages and towns but last week’s mass kidnapping is unprecedented. The extremists use the young women as porters, cooks and sex slaves, according to Nigerian officials.

Boko Haram was on a rampage last week, staging four attacks in three days that began with a massive explosion during rush hour at a busy bus station Monday morning in Abuja, the capital in the center of the country, which killed at least 75 people and wounded 141.