ICC Note:
In a video released Monday, Boko Haram leader and spokesman, Abubakar Shekau is recorded promulgating Islamist propaganda to images of what appear to be some of the more than 240 girls abducted in two separate raids by Boko Haram militants conducted this and last month. In the video, the girls pictured, which may or may not actually be those abducted from Chibok and Warabe villages, are caught reciting Quran’ic passages and making Islamic proclamations of faith. Some fear, based on the images and the revelation that 90% of the 180 abducted girls identified by a list leaked last week are professed Christians, that Boko Haram abducted with the intention of mass forced conversions. According to recent reports, Nigerian police are claiming 53 of those abducted have successfully escaped. All this as international public interest in the abductions continues to mount, purring foreign governments, such as those of the U.S., U.K., France, China, and Israel to provide assistance to the Nigerian state in its ongoing manhunt to locate and free the girls. In a previous video, Shekau stated his intent to sell those abducted “on the marketplace,” per Allah’s “instruction.” Experts believe some of the girls have already been forcefully married and sold into sexual and domestic servitudes.
05/12/2014 Nigeria (Christian Post) – Some of the Nigerian girls who managed to escape after armed men from the Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram kidnapped them last month shared their stories, while the governor of the state where the incident took place says more than 200 girls still captive have been “sighted.”
On the night of April 14-15, the gunmen commanded the hundreds of students at the Government Girls Secondary School in the town of Chibok in eastern Borno State to gather outside, and then they went into a storeroom and took all the food.
“They then moved all of us to the main gate and brought their cars where they loaded the food they had taken and asked us to get in,” one of the girls was quoted as saying by Al Jazeera. “The girls that had no shoes on and were not wearing veils were told to go and fetch them as they started to set the school on fire.”
Police say 53 girls managed to escape.
“I told my friend that it is better to be killed than to be taken to a place that we did not know,” another girl was quoted as saying, about how she and her friend ran for their lives.
Sarah Lawan, a 19-year-old student, told The Associated Press that most girls made no attempt to escape as the gunmen had threatened to shoot them. “I am pained that my other colleagues could not summon the courage to run away with me,” she said. “Now I cry each time I come across their parents and see how they weep when they see me.”
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