ICC Note:
In a reprehensible video released May 5th, Boko Haram leader and spokesman, Ababukar Shekau, claimed responsibility on behalf of the radical Islamic insurgency and U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) for the abduction of 243 girls from a government-sponsored secondary school in Northern Nigeria’s Christian stronghold, Chibok. Threatening to sell the more than 230 girls still in captivity to human trafficking rings just beyond Nigeria’s borders with Chad and Cameroon, Shekau claimed “Allah has instructed [him] to sell them.” The video was circulated just a day after the release of a list compiled by affiliates of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) that identifies 163 of the 230 still missing girls as professed Christians.
05/05/2014 Nigeria (Reuters) – The leader of Boko Haram on Monday threatened to sell more than 200 schoolgirls his Islamist militant group kidnapped in northeastern Nigeria last month.
Boko Haram militants stormed an all-girl secondary school in the village of Chibok, in Borno state, on April 14 and packed the teenagers, who had been taking exams, onto trucks and disappeared into a remote area along the border with Cameroon.
The attack shocked Nigerians, who have been growing accustomed to hearing about atrocities in an increasingly bloody five-year-old Islamist insurgency in the north.
“I abducted your girls. I will sell them in the market, by Allah,” Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau says in a video, chuckling as he stands in front of an armored personnel carrier with two masked militants wielding AK-47s on either side of him.
“Allah has instructed me to sell them. They are his property and I will carry out his instructions,” he says.
Boko Haram, seen as the main security threat to Nigeria, Africa’s leading energy producer, is growing bolder and extending its reach. The kidnapping occurred on the day a bomb blast, also blamed on Boko Haram, killed 75 people on the edge of Abuja, the first attack on the capital in two years.
The group’s name means “Western education is sinful” and Shekau in the video makes reference to the fact that the girls were undergoing Western education.
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