Shekau shows Chibok girls, police women in new video

Leader of Boko Haram faction, Abubakar Shekau yesterday released two new video clips that showed the remainder of 264 Chibok school girls abducted by the group in April 2014.

Shekau also showed some police women he abducted in June 2017 along Maiduguri Damboa road. The women, who were intercepted while conveying the corpse of their female colleague, were seen sobbing in the footage.

Shekau was shown at the beginning of the video firing a machine-gun; he stood in the midst of hooded fighters dressed in military attire. He said contrary to claims by the military that he was wounded and nursing a life threatening injury, “I’m alive, hale and hearty.”

He vowed to continue the insurgency and also alleged it was his men who brought down an army helicopter recently.

Shekau said the remaining Chibok girls in his custody have all accepted Islam and would not return, saying the elderly police women would also remain in captivity.

About 14 of the Chibok girls, three of them with babies, said they would not return to their parents, adding that they were married off by their abductors.

“We are the Chibok girls… By the grace of Allah, we will not return to you,” one of them said.

The Boko Haram abducted 276 girls from the Government Girls Secondary School, Chibok in 2014.

Fifty-nine of them managed to escape, while being ferried into the Sambisa forest.

At present, 107 girls have been released through negotiations, escaped on their own or rescued.

On January 4, the Nigerian army said it had rescued one of the girls near Gwoza town in Borno State.