US President Barack Obama on Tuesday described the kidnapping of more than 220 schoolgirls by Islamists in Nigeria as “heartbreaking” and “outrageous” as Washington deployed military experts in the hunt for the children.
Obama urged global action against Boko Haram and confirmed Nigerian leaders had accepted an offer to deploy US personnel there, soon after the extremist group was alleged to have seized eight more girls, aged between 12 and 15, in the embattled northeast.
The first group of girls were taken three weeks ago, and concerns have been mounting about their fate after Boko Haram chief Abubakar Shekau claimed responsibility, saying his group was holding the schoolgirls as “slaves” and threatening to “sell them in the market.”
Photo: AFP
Speaking to US broadcaster ABC, Obama said: “It’s a heartbreaking situation, outrageous situation.”
“This may be the event that helps to mobilize the entire international community to finally do something against this horrendous organization that’s perpetrated such a terrible crime,” he added.
The team sent to Nigeria consists of “military, law enforcement, and other agencies,” Obama said, and will work to “identify where in fact these girls might be and provide them help,” Obama said.
He denounced Boko Haram as “one of the worst regional or local terrorist organizations.”
US officials have voiced fears that the more than 220 girls, aged between 16 and 18, have already been smuggled into neighboring countries. The governments of Chad and Cameroon have denied the girls were in their countries.
Their fate has sparked global outrage and may constitute a crime against humanity according to the UN.
Shekau said his extreme Islamist group was holding the schoolgirls abducted on April 14 from Chibok as “slaves” and threatened to “sell them in the market,” in a video released on Monday.
Parents of those taken 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,” one mother, Lawal Zanna, said by telephone from Chibok.
The latest kidnappings, on Sunday, also took place in Borno state, a stronghold of the Islamist group.
Abdullahi Sani, a resident of Warabe, said gunmen had moved “door to door, looking for girls.”
“They forcefully took away eight girls between the ages of 12 and 15,” he said, in an account confirmed by other witnesses.
However, a local official yesterday confirmed the Warabe attack and raised the number of girls taken on Sunday to 11.
“After leaving Warabe the gunmen stormed the Wala village which is 5 kilometers away and abducted three more girls,” Gwoza local government official Hamba Tada said:
In related news, Nigerian first lady Patience Jonathan has fueled outrage over the kidnappings after several women who met with her on Sunday to discuss the kidnappings were arrested or have gone missing.
A leader of a protest march for the missing schoolgirls said that Jonathan ordered her and another protest leader arrested on Monday, expressed doubts there was any kidnapping and accused them of belonging to Boko Haram.
The first lady’s office has denied there were any arrests.
Saratu Angus Ndirpaya of Chibok town said State Security Service agents drove her and protest leader Naomi Mutah Nyadar to a police station on Monday after the all-night meeting at the presidential villa in Abuja, the capital. Ndirpaya said police immediately released her, but that Nyadar was detained.
Later on Monday, police said Nyadar had been returned home.
A police statement denied that Nyadar had been detained, saying she was “invited … [to] an interactive and fact-finding interview.”
“She [Jonathan] told so many lies, that we just wanted the government of Nigeria to have a bad name, that we did not want to support her husband’s rule,” Ndirpaya said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press.
She said other women at the meeting, allies of the first lady including officials of the government and the ruling party, cheered and chanted “yes, yes,” when Jonathan accused them of belonging to Boko Haram
She said Nyadar and herself do not have daughters among those abducted, but were supporting the mothers of kidnapped daughters.
Jonathan said the women “had no right to protest, “especially Nyadar, because she works for a government agency.
Protesters said they are also concerned that they have been unable to reach two other people who were at the meeting: the principal of Chibok Government Girls Secondary School and the town’s local government chairman.
In a report on the meeting, the Daily Trust newspaper quoted Jonathan as ordering all Nigerian women to stop protesting, and threatening “should anything happen to them during protests, they should blame themselves.”
Additional reporting by The Associated Press
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