See also:
- Nigerian jihad leader: “There is a market for selling humans. Allah says I should sell.”
- Nigeria: Police arrest leader of protests over abducted girls
- Nigeria: 329 schoolgirls abducted by jihadis raped 15 times daily, forced to convert to Islam
The Telegraph, via Jihad Watch — May 6, 2014
Suspected Boko Haram gunmen have kidnapped eight girls aged between 12 and 15 from a village near one of their strongholds in northeast Nigeria.
“They were many, and all of them carried guns,” said Lazarus Musa, a resident of Warabe, where the attack happened.
“They came in two vehicles painted in army colour. They started shooting in our village.”
A police source said the girls were taken away in the early hours of Tuesday on trucks, along with looted livestock and food. The Islamist rebels are still holding 276 girls they abducted from a secondary school on April 14.
Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau said in a video released on Monday that Allah had told him to sell the girls taken by his fighters from a secondary school in the village of Chibok, in northeastern Borno state.
The abduction on Tuesday appears to bear similarities to the mass-kidnapping on Good Friday.
In the Chibok attack, as with the Warabe seizure, the militants arrived disguised as soldiers.
“Don’t worry, we’re soldiers,” one 16-year-old girl told AP she remembered them saying. “Nothing is going to happen to you.”
The gunmen commanded the hundreds of students at the Chibok Government Girls Secondary School to gather outside. The men went into a storeroom and removed all the food. Then they set fire to the room.
“They started shouting, ‘Allahu Akhbar,’ (God is great),” the 16-year-old student said. “And we knew.”
A local government official, Bana Lawal, received a warning call on his mobile phone, and was told that about 200 heavily armed militants in 20 pickup trucks and more than 30 motorcycles were headed toward his town.
He roused sleeping residents and told them to flee into the bush and the nearby hills.
But two hours later, when the Boko Haram militants arrived, the local forces were unable to fight them off and the extremists headed for the boarding school.
The men set the school ablaze and herded the girl’s group onto the backs of three pickup trucks.
The trucks drove through three villages, but then the car of fighters following them broke down. That’s when the 16-year-old girl and her friend jumped out, and managed to escape by running into the forest.
Britain and the US has offered help in finding the girls, but the Nigerian government has been criticised by the pace of rescue efforts.
It was not clear whether the eight girls taken on Tuesday were being held with the other 276.
