A Nigerian schoolgirl rescued after two years of captivity by Boko Haram militants was yesterday scheduled to meet with Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari amid hopes that she can help shed light on the whereabouts of more than 200 other missing girls.
Soldiers working with a civilian vigilante group rescued the girl, identified as Amina Ali Darsha Nkeki, on Tuesday near Damboa in the remote northeast, with officials confirming she was one of 219 girls abducted from a secondary school in the northeastern city of Chibok.
An army spokesman said she was found with her four-month-old baby and a “suspected Boko Haram terrorist” named Mohammed Hayatu, who claimed to be the girl’s husband and was also taken into custody.
Photo: EPA/NIGERIAN MILITARY
Her mother, Binta Ali Nkeki, in an interview last year said the girl’s father had died a few months after her abduction, with the stress taking a toll on his health.
Her rescue should give a boost to Buhari, a former military ruler who made crushing the Boko Haram extremist insurgency a pillar of his presidential campaign last year.
Boko Haram captured 276 girls from a school in Chibok in April 2014 as part of a seven-year-old insurgency to set up a Muslim state in the north, which has killed about 15,000 people and displaced more than 2 million.
Some girls escaped in the melee, but parents of the missing girls accused then-Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan of not doing enough to find their daughters, whose disappearance sparked a global campaign, #BringBackOurGirls.
Jonathan lost office in an election in March last year.
The girl’s mother last year spoke of her daughter’s fear of Boko Haram, but of her enjoyment of attending school and doing well at her studies.
Her mother told the Murtala Muhammed Foundation, a Nigerian nonprofit organization researching a book on the missing Chibok girls, that she was not sure of the girl’s age, the youngest of her 13 children, of whom only three survived their early years.
“She always sewed her own clothes,” her mother said in the interview released to the Thomson Reuters Foundation by Aisha Oyebode of the Murtala Muhammed Foundation.
“After Amina was kidnapped, only two [of our children] were left alive,” she said, adding that her son and other daughter both live in Lagos.
She said she constantly thought of her lost daughter, who had always helped her around the house.
“[My son] said I should take it easy and stop crying,” she said in the interview.
“He reminded me that I am not the only parent who lost a child,” she added.
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