Uncertainty Remains For Over 100 Girls Kidnapped in Nigeria

Doubts remain about the fate of more than a hundred students abducted in the night from Monday to Tuesday in a boarding school in the northeast of Nigeria. While the Nigerian army claimed late Wednesday that almost all young women had been released, the families and the Director of the Center in the early hours of Thursday denied the veracity of this information. «To Chibok (place of the incident), only 14 of the 129 missing girls have returned», Asabe Kwambura, administrator of the school, local media reported. Only a few hours earlier, Chris Olukolade, spokesman for the Ministry of Defense, claimed that all the schoolgirls, except eight, had returned with their families.

The attack on the boarding school began at 9 a.m. last Monday night and lasted until 3 in the morning from the previous day, after heavily armed men, suspected members of the Boko Haram Islamist militia, besieged the Chibok School, in the Northern State of Borno. During the assault, the terrorists made several journeys to choose their victims, aged between 16 and 18.

However, the wave of denials about the current state of the abducted again demonstrates the misinformation that abounds in the crusade of the Nigerian Executive against Boko Haram.

By the end of 2012, an Amnesty International report denounced «serious violations of human rights’ of the army in its war against the Islamist militia.

The report-«Nigeria: Trapped in the cycle of violence»-, the organization condemned the detention arbitrary without charges of ‘hundreds of people accused of links with Boko Haram’, as well as ‘extrajudicial executions or disappearances’ carried out by the armed forces.

Similarly, it reminded both parties in the conflict that «there is a vicious cycle of violence currently in Nigeria» and «Nigerian people are caught in the middle».

And numbers, indeed, give the reason: only so far in the year, the increase in attacks by the armed group, as well as uncontrolled retaliation by security forces have caused the deaths of at least 1,500 people Northeast Nigeria (more than half of whom civilians).