Ex-Nigeria president Goodluck Jonathan ‘rejected offer to rescue kidnapped girls’

LAGOS – Nigeria, under the leadership of former president Goodluck Jonathan, reportedly rejected Britain’s offer to rescue the more than 200 school girls kidnapped by Boko Haram insurgents from a boarding school in 2014.

Quoting the UK Observer, The Guardian said that British armed forces offered to attempt to set free the girls but were “rebuffed” by Jonathan, the west African country’s leader at the time.

The girls were kidnapped by Boko Haram from a boarding school in the remote northeastern town of Chibok in April 2014. A significant number of them still remained in captivity after some of them were released last year.

The British forces reportedly detected the Boko Haram kidnappers just a few weeks after the girls were abducted, but action was refused.

“The girls were located in the first few weeks of the RAF mission...We offered to rescue them, but the Nigerian government declined,” a source involved in Operation Turus was quoted as saying.

A report yesterday by Nigeria’s Daily Trust said that Jonathan had since dismissed the report as “false”, saying that he never “snubbed” the British forces’ offer.

Jonathan’s spokesperson, Ikechukwu Eze said: “We can confidently say the lies in this report are selfevident,” he said in a statement.

“We are however not surprised that this kind of concocted story is coming out at this point in time, as it appears that some people who have obviously been playing politics with the issue of the Chibok girls will stop at nothing to further their interest.”

BBC said that a spokesperson for the present administration maintained that the Observer’s report confirmed their claim that Jonathan had been “playing politics” with the Boko Haram insurgency.

Meanwhile, At least eight people were killed and 28 others injured in a stampede in Zambia’s capital Lusaka yesterday as thousands of poor people struggled to claim food handouts, police said.

Police have opened an inquiry into the deadly crush that followed 35 000 people trying to enter a sports complex where the Church of Christ was giving out food parcels.

“We have since dispersed the gathering and an inquiry into the matter has been instituted,” a police statement said.

Sixty percent of people in Zambia live below the poverty line and 42 percent are considered to be extremely poor, the World Bank says.— AFP.