Boko Haram wants to exchange militia for kidnapped girls

Boko Haram on Monday has sent a video to the French Agence France Presse in which their leader Abubakar Shekau in Nigeria wants the release of members of the criminal gang in exchange for releasing the more than 200 young students kidnapped the April 14.

In the video Shekau says that women have already been converted to Islam, and shows a hundred of them wearing the hijab, apparently reciting fragments of the Qur’an and making statements of faith, and surrounded by vegetation in an unidentified rural area. It is the first image of young people between 17 and 18, who were abducted from a school in the northeastern city of Chibok, in the state of Borno, mostly Christian.

The radical group kidnapped a total of 276 adolescents, but only has 223 in his possession. The rest fled. These have revealed that the group could continue Sambisa forest, near the Cameroon border, where Boko Haram has several shelters.

Last week, Boko Haram issued another video in which Shekau threatens to sell the young women as slaves. Evidence collected by the French agency ensure that some of the students have already been sold for $ 12 in border areas of Chad and Cameroon. The announcement of the sect has caused a global wave of rejection and entertainment personalities, sports and international politics have demanded the release of the girls.

Not the first time Boko Haram kidnaps girls or young women. Between January and February,  more than twenty women were abducted by the criminal gang. Some of them were later rescued and had been forced to marry and have sex with their captors.

Since the police killed in 2009 the then leader of Boko Haram, Mohammed Yusuf, the radicals held a bloody campaign that has left more than 3,000 dead.

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Posted by Khalil Khan on May 13 2014. Filed under Africa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.