Rescued schoolgirl meets the president
Print Edition
A NIGERIAN schoolgirl rescued after over two years of captivity with Boko Haram militants met President Muhammadu Buhari yesterday amid hopes she can shed light on the fate of 218 other abducted Chibok girls.
Amina Ali Darsha Nkeki, who was flown in from the northeast regional capital Maiduguri two days after her rescue, wore a veil and multi-colored dress as security guards escorted her into Buhari’s office in the Nigerian capital Abuja.
She was accompanied by her mother, Binta, and Nigeria’s defense minister and national security adviser.
Soldiers working with a civilian vigilante group found Amina on Tuesday near Damboa, south of Maiduguri. Officials confirmed she was one of 219 girls abducted from the government school in Chibok in April 2014.
She was found with her 4-month-old baby while a “suspected Boko Haram terrorist” called Mohammed Hayatu, who said he was Amina’s husband, was also detained, the army said.
Pictures released by the Nigerian military showed the clean-shaven man in a white shirt and cream slacks sitting beside Amina on a hospital bed cradling the infant in his arms.
Amina’s rescue should give a boost to Buhari, a former military ruler who made crushing the Boko Haram Islamist insurgency a pillar of his presidential campaign last year.
However, a claim by activist group #Bringbackourgirls that the remaining abductees are under heavy guard in the Sambisa forest, the jihadists’ final stronghold, will put pressure on him to send in rescue squads.
Boko Haram captured 276 girls in their night-time raid on Chibok, one of the most audacious assaults of a seven-year-old insurgency to set up an Islamic state in the north.
More than 15,000 people have been killed and 2 million displaced in Nigeria and neighboring Chad, Niger and Cameroon.
Some girls escaped but parents of the remaining 219 accused then-President Goodluck Jonathan of not doing enough to find their daughters, whose disappearance led to a global campaign #bringbackourgirls.
Binta said Amina’s father died some months after his daughter was abducted.
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