More than 100 schoolgirls in Nigeria were abducted on April 14, and many of them are still missing. Now an Islamist militant group, Boko Haram, has claimed responsibility for kidnapping them and taken eight more girls, reports the BBC.
The latest kidnapping happened on May 4 in the village of Warabe, in Borno state. The girls taken were aged between 12 and 15. The following day, Boko Haram’s leader said the terrorist organization would “sell” more than 230 girls seized in the April 14 abductions as slaves. “God instructed me to sell them, they are his properties and I will carry out his instructions,” Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau said in a May 5 video, confirming that his group had abducted them.
The US says Nigeria has accepted an offer of American help. “We’ve already sent in a team to Nigeria,” the BBC quoted President Barack Obama as saying today. “We want to provide whatever assistance is possible,” US Secretary of State John Kerry was quoted as saying. That help includes expert hostage negotiators and military personnel, according to an article in the New York Times.
The second kidnapping involved at least eight girls who were seized in their homes to prevent them from attending school, the Times reported. Unicef called the latest abduction “an outrage and a worsening nightmare for the girls themselves, and for the families of the more than 200 girls who have been stolen from their communities in the last several weeks.”
