Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari on Thursday met Amina Ali Nkek, the first Chibok girl rescued by security operatives in Sambisa forest.
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They were handed over to Borno state governor Kashim Shettima, who declared he would in turn hand her to President Muhammadu Buhari “to present to the nation”. While the activist who found the girl gave her name as Amina Ali, the Nigerian Army, in a confirmatory statement issued on Wednesday confirmed this. “I believe that in the coming days and weeks more recoveries will be made”.
Amina Ali, who was discovered by civilian vigilantes and troops on Tuesday, flew from the Borno state capital, Maiduguri, in northeast Nigeria, to the capital, Abuja, with her mother, Binta.
The movement, which inspired a worldwide social media campaign using the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls that reached to U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama, has met faithfully every week at Abuja’s Unity Fountain to demand the government act more aggressively to rescue the girls.
He said the government would make it a priority that Amina, who showed Buhari her four-month old baby, can go back to school.
There was global outrage when 276 girls – mostly aged between 16 and 18 – were abducted from their school in Chibok in April 2014. On Thursday the military released pictures of a clean-shaven man in a white shirt and cream slacks sitting beside Amina on a hospital bed holding the infant in his lap. More than 15,000 people have been killed and two million displaced in Nigeria and neighbouring Chad, Niger and Cameroon.
Amina, with her mother and baby, was taken to a military camp and flown by helicopter on Wednesday to Maiduguri, the biggest city in the northeast that is the birthplace of Boko Haram and the headquarters of Nigeria’s war against the group.
The 19-year-old’s uncle, Yakubu Nkeki, said she was pregnant and traumatised, but otherwise unharmed.
The Nigerian military aided by its neighbours, has recaptured most territory once lost to Boko Haram but the group still regularly stages suicide bombings.
Amina’s mother said she feared she would never see her daughter again after the abduction, which had left her “broken and devastated”. But the jihadist group, which previous year pledged loyalty to Islamic State, still regularly stages suicide bombings.
It later emerged that the Chibok girls were not among them.
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That failure is partly to blame for the electoral defeat a year ago of former President Goodluck Jonathan, who was seen as uncaring of their plight and uncommitted to rescuing them.
