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Hope, sadness among Chibok parents after release of Boko Haram video

In the video, one girl, identified by the news agency Reuters as Maina Yakubu, makes a plea for help and says that recent Nigerian airstrikes have killed some of the girls.

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One man confirmed to CNN that his daughter was seen speaking in the video.

“Some of the parents who were able to see the video are very happy to at least know that their children are alive”. One is holding a small baby.

She spoke in the Chibok dialect.

The authorities said in May that one of the missing girls had been found and President Muhammadu Buhari vowed to rescue the others.

He said: ‘We are nevertheless studying the video clips to examine if the victims died from other causes rather (than) from the allegation of airstrike’. It has been over two years since the girls were kidnapped from Chibok town.

Nigeria’s Information Minister Lai Mohammed, who attended the same meeting, said that the government was in contact with Boko Haram but did not say how close the Chibok girls were to being freed.

Government officials are skeptical about claims of the deaths being due to military airstrikes.

Boko Haram kidnapped 219 girls from their secondary school in Chibok in April 2014, as part of an insurgency which began in 2009 to set up an Islamic state in the north that has killed some 15,000 people and displaced more than 2 million. Relatives of the captive schoolgirls and other demonstrators hold regular protests in Abuja, the Nigerian capital, calling for the government to increase its efforts to find them.

Salkida says he was given the video by the Boko Haram wing led by Abubakar Shekau, who is in a leadership battle with a lieutenant named by the Islamic State group as the new leader of what it calls its West Africa Province.

And as The Associated Press reported, it’s “not clear how many schoolgirls have died among the 218 who remain missing”.

How many kidnapped girls from Chibok lyceum are still living in Boko Haram’s shelter?

The video showed some 50 girls of the over 200 girls believed to still be under Boko Haram’s captivity.

The militants’ initial abduction of 276 girls from Chibok in April 2014 drew global attention, including from the Obama White House, with the #BringBackOurGirls campaign.

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Aid workers say there is a catastrophic humanitarian crisis in newly freed but still unsafe areas where a half million people are starving and babies are dying daily.

Boko Haram release footage showing kidnapped Chibok schoolgirls