On Sunday, Boko Haram released a video of the Chibok girls, showing some who are still alive and claiming that others died in air strikes. The video was released on social media by a Nigerian journalist who is in contact with a faction of Boko Haram that split from the main Islamist militant group after its leader was removed by the Islamic State.
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“This in short is our message to the Federal Government and the parents of the Chibok Girls: as long as the government does not release our people, we will also never release these girls”, a masked man said in Hausa, one of Nigeria’s main languages.
The anonymous Boko Haram member says on the video that they’ve married off 40 of the Chibok girls, and that some were killed during government airstrikes.
“Some of them have died as a result of aerial bombardment”.
Boko Haram seized more than 270 girls from their school in Chibok, northeast Nigeria, in April 2014, part of a seven-year-old insurgency to set up an ISIS in the north that has killed some 15,000 people and displaced more than two million.
But the missing schoolgirls were not among them, despite several unconfirmed sightings.
An intelligence analyst, Tanwa Ashiru, has called on the military to rethink its decision to declare the journalist and two others wanted, over the newly released Boko Haram video. The end of the video shows dead bodies lying on the ground, said to be those killed by air strikes.
Yakuba’s father told CNN, “I’m very, very happy I saw my daughter on the video and I’m very happy she’s alive”.
But the video shows only 50 girls, while 218 girls remain missing. She pleaded with the Nigerian government to release Boko Haram prisoners so that they too can be freed.
“All the girls that have been rescued have rescued themselves”.
Abayomi Olonishakin, on Monday said the demand by Boko Haram terrorists that their members in captivity be swapped with the abducted Chibok girls was a political one, and would have no effect on military operations to flush them out.
Boko Haram has been forced out of most towns in the past year and has turned to assaulting remote villages and using suicide bombers to attack targets such as mosques and marketplaces.
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One of the three persons declared wanted by the army, Mr. Bolori, said he made himself available to the military authorities but was told to wait until later before they take him in for interrogations.
