JONATHAN STEPS UP HUNT FOR ABDUCTED GIRLS
Nigerian president asks Obama for help after search is delayed for weeks
NIGERIAN President Goodluck Jonathan held a meeting with security, school and state officials and ordered that “everything must be done” to free the 276 girls held captive by Islamic extremists, one of his advisers said yesterday amid growing national outrage at the government’s response to the abduction.
Jonathan said in a televised “media chat” that he believed Nigeria was winning its war against an Islamic uprising.
Two bomb blasts in three weeks that had killed about 100 people and injured more than 200 in the capital, Abuja, “does not mean the situation is worsening. I believe we are succeeding,” he said, though the death tolls tell a different story.
More than 1 500 people died in the insurgency this year, compared to an estimated 3 600 between 2010 and last year. The Abuja blasts are blamed on Boko Haram, the Islamic terrorist network.
Jonathan said he had been asking for and getting help from the US, but that President Barack Obama expressed concern to him about allegations of gross human rights abuses by security forces accused of summary executions and the killings in detention of thousands of people.
“I said: ‘Send someone to see what we are doing and assist us, give us equipment that will help us, because we need sophisticated (equipment), don’t just say there is some matter of alleged abuses’,” Jonathan said, describing one of two conversations with the US leader.
US Secretary of State John Kerry promised help at the weekend.
“The kidnapping of hundreds of children by Boko Haram is an unconscionable crime, and we will do everything possible to support the Nigerian government to return these young women to their homes and to hold the perpetrators to justice,” Kerry said from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Jonathan’s meeting on Saturday night was the first time the president had met all stakeholders, including the principal of the Chibok Government Girls Secondary School in north-eastern Nigeria where the girls and young women were kidnapped in a pre-dawn raid on April 15, presidential adviser Reuben Abati said.
Nigerians’ anger at the failure to rescue the students, and protest marches last week in major Nigerian cities as well as New York City, have spurred Jonathan’s government to action, which many see as uncaring of the girls’ plight.
“The president has given very clear directives that everything must be done to ensure these girls must be brought back to safety,” Abati said.
The police said last week that the actual number abducted had risen to more than 300 and that 276 remained in captivity. It said 53 students managed to escape their captors. None have been rescued by the military, which initially said it was in hot pursuit of the abductors.
Some of the girls have been forced into “marriage” with their abductors and were paid a nominal bride price of $12 (R125.64), according to a federal senator from the area whose report is unverified.
Some of the young women had been taken across Nigeria’s borders to Cameroon and Chad, parents said.
In north-eastern Nigeria, police yesterday morning foiled an attack by suicide bombers who had packed a pickup vehicle with explosives and petrol, the defence ministry said.
Police arrested one of the culprits, who said the target was a police post in the centre of Damaturu, said spokesman Major General Chris Olukolade.
In a further indication of security threats confronting Nigeria, the US Embassy on Friday warned Americans that “groups associated with terrorism” may be planning “an unspecified attack” on a Sheraton hotel in Lagos. The city, on the Atlantic Ocean, has never been attacked, though police last year arrested six suspected extremists on popular Bar Beach. – Sapa-AP