EIGHT MORE NIGERIAN GIRLS ABDUCTED BY MILITANTS

Abuja, 7 Rajab 1435/6 May 2014 (MINA) – Eight more Nigerian girls have been abducted by suspected armed group in Nigeria’s northern Borno State, according to local residents.

“My sister’s daughter was among the eight innocent girls taken away,” Ndah Sulayman, a local resident, told Anadolu Agency by phone.

Taofeeqi Manu, another local, said gunmen believed to be Boko Haram members attacked Waraba village in Borno’s Gwoza local council area on Sunday night.

He said the gunmen had abducted eight teenage girls, ranging in age from 12 to 15 years old.

“Apart from abducting the girls, they also loaded our foodstuff and livestock onto the truck they came with,” Manu told Anadolu Agency by phone as quoted by Mi’raj Islamic News Agency (MINA).

“Of course we all ran away,” he added. “Five people were killed.”

Sulayman described the abductions as part of a wider campaign by militants, which, he asserted, was “being suffered in silence by villages outside the main centers and towns where soldiers are concentrated.”

Gwoza, a town roughly160km from Maiduguri, provincial capital of Borno, has been hard hit by Boko Haram attacks in recent months.

“This is the third time Boko Haram will be kidnapping our girls,” Sulayman said.

Boko Haram on Monday claimed responsibility for last month’s abduction of scores of secondary schoolgirls from Borno’s Chibok area.

“I abducted your girls,” a man claiming to be Abubakar Shekau, the group’s leader, said in a video seen by the Guardian. “I will sell them in the market, by Allah. I will sell them off and marry them off. There is a market for selling humans.

“Women are slaves. I want to reassure my Muslim brothers that Allah says slaves are permitted in Islam,” he added, in an apparent reference to an ancient tradition of enslaving women captured during jihad, or holy war.

According to Sulayman, the Chibok incident attracted considerable attention “because the number [of abductees] was high and it occurred in a school. Other than that, this [mass abductions] is becoming routine.”

On April 14, militants stormed the Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok, located on the fringes of the Sambisa Forest, a known Boko Haram hideout.

They loaded scores of the schoolgirls onto trucks before driving away unhindered.

The exact number of the abducted schoolgirls, however, continues to be dogged by controversy.

Since the Chibok incident, many locals have told AA that the dramatic mass kidnapping wasn’t an isolated event.

“No one is safe,” Chibok resident Musadiq Aruwa told AA. “Kidnapping is rampant…especially on the highways.” (T/P09/E01).

Mi’raj Islamic News Agency (MINA).