(Kano) The Nigerian army announced on Wednesday that it had found a former student of the “girls of Chibok”, the third in a month, they who had been kidnapped by the jihadist group Boko Haram eight years ago.
Posted yesterday at 5:52 p.m.
The young woman was one of 276 schoolgirls aged 12 to 17 abducted in 2014 from their boarding school in Chibok, in northeastern Nigeria. This affair had provoked a global campaign called #BringBackOurGirls (“#RamenerNosFilles”).
General Christopher Musa, the commander of military forces in the region, presented Ruth Bitrus, 24, with her two-year-old son to the press outside a military barracks.
“Today we have with us one of Chibok’s daughters, the third we have found in two months,” General Musa said at the ceremony. He did not specify when M.me Bitrus had been found.
The young woman, who was 16 when she was abducted, escaped at night and walked for three days in the bush before reaching the city of Bama and presenting herself to soldiers.
“I looked for a way to escape the very day we were kidnapped,” she told reporters during the ceremony, carrying her child in her arms.
“I was forced to convert to Islam and married to a man with whom I had this child”.
Last month, two other “girls of Chibok” were found separately after their escape from the forest of Sambisa, one of the main hideouts of the jihadists.
Of the 276 schoolgirls abducted in 2014, 57 managed to escape and 80 others were exchanged for Boko Haram commanders in negotiations with the authorities.
Subsequently, other girls were found but more than a hundred are still missing. According to propaganda videos, many were forcibly married off to jihadist fighters.
Since the kidnapping of “the Chibok girls”, many other schools or universities have been attacked in northern Nigeria in recent years, some by jihadists, but mostly by criminal groups who practice mass kidnapping for ransom.
The jihadist insurgency in the northeast has been going on for 13 years and has left 40,000 dead and 2.2 million displaced.