Shaken escaped female Nigerian teenager afraid to return to school
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ONE of the teenagers who escaped from Islamic extremists who abducted more than 300 schoolgirls says the kidnapping was “too terrifying for words,” and she is now scared to go back to school.
Sarah Lawan, a 19-year-old science student, spoke yesterday as Nigerians prayed for the safety of the 276 students still held captive. Their prayers were joined by Pope Francis.
“Let us all join in prayer for the immediate release of the schoolgirls kidnapped in Nigeria,” the Roman Catholic leader tweeted, using the trending #BringBackOurGirls.
Lawan said that more of the girls could have escaped but that they were frightened by their captors’ threats to shoot them. She spoke in the local Hausa language in a phone interview from Chibok, her home and the site of the mass abduction in northeast Nigeria.
The failure to rescue those who remain captive four weeks later has attracted mounting national and international outrage. Last week, Nigeria was forced to accept international help in the search, after ignoring offers for weeks.
More experts are expected in Nigeria to help rescue the girls, including US hostage negotiators and others from Britain, France, China and Spain.
“I am pained that my other colleagues could not summon the courage to run away with me,” Lawan said. “Now I cry each time I come across their parents and see how they weep when they see me.”
Police say 53 students have escaped. Nigeria’s homegrown Boko Haram terrorist network is threatening to sell those who remain in captivity into slavery.
In churches across the nation, Nigerians prayed for the girls, whose plight has brought together ordinary people in a year that had seen growing dissension between Muslims and Christians, disagreements exacerbated by the increasingly deadly attacks of the Boko Haram terrorist network. Africa’s most populous nation of 170 million has almost equal numbers of Christians and Muslims.
The Reverend Stephen Omale prayed at a church in Abuja, the Nigerian capital.
“Wherever they are, God will bring them out in his own mercy, he will see that they are brought out safely, without harm and also that this act will bring an end to all those who are perpetrating these acts,” he told congregants.
Boko Haram claimed two bomb blasts that killed about 100 people and wounded over 200 in the capital last month.
Britain, Nigeria’s former colonizer, has said it hopes to help rescue the girls and to halt the five-year-old Islamic uprising that has killed thousands of Muslims and Christians and has driven some 750,000 people from their homes.
US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel cautioned that it is “going to be very difficult” to find the missing girls. In an interview with ABC’s “This Week” that aired yesterday, he said “ It’s a vast country... But we’re going to bring to bear every asset we can possibly use to help the Nigerian government.”
A Nigerian security expert warned that militants may have laid land mines to discourage any pursuit, and said strategists may be considering starving them out.
Also yesterday, a leading Nigerian rights group demanded the UN Security Council impose sanctions on Boko Haram.
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