KANO: Suspected Boko Haram activists have kidnapped eight more girls from Nigeria’s embattled northeast, residents said yesterday, after the extremist group’s leader claimed responsibility for abducting more than 200 schoolgirls last month.
The girls were seized by gunmen in the village of Warabe as global outrage grew three weeks after the mass kidnapping in the nearby town of Chibok, which the UN warned may be a crime against humanity.
Boko Haram chief Abubakar Shekau said the extremist Islamist group was holding the schoolgirls abducted from Chibok on April 14 as “slaves,” and threatened to “sell them in the market,” in a video.
The parents of those taken from Chibok said Shekau’s video had made an already horrifying situation even worse.
“All along, we have been imagining what could happen to our daughters in the hands of these heinous people,” Lawal Zanna, the mother of one the hostages, said by phone from Chibok.
“Now Shekau has confirmed our fears,” he said.
The latest kidnappings also took place in Borno state, the home base of the Islamist group.
Abdullahi Sani, a resident of Warabe, said gunmen had moved “door to door, looking for girls,” late on Sunday.
“They forcefully took away eight girls between the ages of 12 and 15,” he added, in an account confirmed by other witnesses.
Initially slow to emerge, global outrage has flared over the abduction of hundreds of schoolgirls when Boko Haram stormed their school and loaded them onto trucks. Several managed to escape but over 220 girls are still being held, according to police.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague on Tuesday called the kidnappings “disgusting” while US senators urged Washington to intervene.
“We cannot close our eyes to the clear evidence of barbarity unfolding before us in Nigeria,” said Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar, her voice breaking as she addressed the Senate on Monday.
And the United Nations warned that the sale of the girls could be a crime against humanity.
AFP
