The 57 Chibok school girls being held by Boko Haram insurgents have been sighted in two villages in Cameroon, parents of the abducted girls said, yesterday.
Speaking with newsmen, the Chairman of Chibok Girls Parents Association, Yakubu Nkenke said the girls were seen by other female captives who at different times were kept by the insurgents in the two villages in northern part of Cameroon.
Nkenke said the girls, who escaped and returned to their village near Chibok, disclosed that the 57 girls were broken into two groups and held in Garin Magaji and Garin Mallam villages located in Marwa in northern Cameroon.
According to him, all the girls were married off to Boko Haram fighters across the border and many of them had children.
“Some of the captives escaped from the villages and spent months in military facility in Bama, where they were screened before they were finally released. One of them told us she met many of our abducted girls in two Cameroonian villages,” he disclosed.
“Seven of the abducted Chibok girls are living in Garin Magaji, while 50 others are held in Garin Mallam where they live with their husbands and children,” he added.
Nkenke said testimonies from parents as well as records in the association’s register matched the names of the girls mentioned by the escapees.
Calling on President Muhammadu Buhari to collaborate with his Cameroonian counterpart to rescue the girls, Nkenke said he believed the military had got the information when they screened the escapees in Bama five months ago.
The Chibok leader noted that the information had thrown Chibok community into confusion and grief as parents expected the authorities to swing into action.
Meanwhile, a former Boko Haram female captive, Zainab, who escaped three months ago, said yesterday that she lived with three Chibok girls in a mountain community, Dutsen Ibrahim, around Gwoza in Borno State, near the Cameroon border.
“I met some of the Chibok girls in Sambisa, when I lived with my first Boko Haram husband in Sambisa. After my husband died in a battle, I was married to another man, Nuru, and we moved to Dutsen Ibrahim, near Ngoshe. There, I met three Chibok girls. One of them now bears the Muslim name, Zainab but I don’t know her Christian name. The other one is Yagana,” she said.
When contacted, the Media Coordinator, Operation Lafiya Dole, Col. Clement Nwachukwu, said he could not comment on the matter as he had been outside Maiduguri, his operational base, and he was, therefore, not aware of such development.
“I am in a noisy environment, I am currently in Biu for an assignment, so I don’t have update on what is going on there,” Nwachukwu added.
Meanwhile, Boko Haram jihadists launched a large assault on a military base in Nigeria’s remote northeast region and killed one soldier, defence officials said, yesterday.
The attack on 145 Battalion in Gashigar, Borno State, began on Saturday and continued into early yesterday morning, Nigerian Air Force spokesman, Ibikunle Daramola said.
“BHTs (Boko Haram terrorists) in 13 gun trucks…advanced towards the camp from two different directions,” Daramola said in a statement.