Boko Haram leader says has ‘married off’ girls to fighters
ABUJA: A man claiming to be Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau said more than 200 girls kidnapped by the group six months ago had been “married off” to its fighters, contradicting Nigerian government claims they would soon be freed.
Shekau says in a new video released late Friday that Boko Haram is still holding the unidentified German who he says is “always crying.”
He says they could “hack him or slaughter him or shoot him.”
Germany’s Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said this week that there was no new information about the abducted German.
A previous video, received through the same channels, showed the beheading of a man friends identified as the pilot of a missing fighter jet that Boko Haram claims to have shot down.
Nigeria’s military says it killed Shekau a year ago, and authorities said in September that they had also killed an imposter posting as him in videos. In the latest recording it is hard to see the man’s face as he his filmed from a distance.
But it is likely to raise grave doubts about whether talks between a Boko Haram faction and the government in neighboring Chad will secure the release of the girls, who were kidnapped from a secondary school in Chibok, northeast Nigeria, in April.
“We have have married them off and they are all in their husbands’ houses,” the man claiming to be Shekau says.
“The over 200 Chibok girls have converted to Islam, which they confess is the best religion. Either their parents accept this and convert too or they can die.” The majority of the kidnapped girls were Christians.
The man in the video also denied there was a cease-fire, and denounced Ahmadu, who says he represents Boko Haram in Chad.
“Who says we are dialoguing or discussing with anybody? Are you talking to yourselves? We don’t know anybody by the name of Danladi. If we meet him now we will cut off his head,” the man in the video says.