Second ‘Chibok girl’ rescued, says Nigerian army

A second girl who was among more than 200 schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram in a raid on their school in the northeastern Nigerian town of Chibok more than two years ago has been rescued, a spokesman for the Nigerian army said on Thursday.

An emailed statement carried by PR Nigeria, an official government agency which releases information, said army spokesman Sani Usman had “confirmed the rescue of another Chibok Girl this evening,” adding that more details would be provided later.

Amina Ali Darsha Nkeki, the first girl to be rescued, was found by soldiers working with a vigilante group on Tuesday near Damboa, south of Maiduguri in the remote northeast where Boko Haram has waged a seven-year insurgency to set up an Islamic state.

Officials confirmed Amina was one of 219 girls abducted from the government school in Chibok in April 2014.

Earlier on Thursday the governor of Borno state, where Chibok is located, said the army was drawing up plans and moving into a Boko Haram forest stronghold in a bid to rescue the remaining girls.

The governor’s comments came shortly after Amina, the first girl to be rescued, met Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari.

“We believe that in the coming weeks we shall recover the rest of the girls,” Governor Kashim Shettima told reporters. “The military is already moving into the forest.”

Previous military attempts to storm Sambisa have met with mixed success, with soldiers making significant in-roads but failing to finish off the Islamist militants after running into bands of well-armed guerrillas, mines and booby traps.

The #Bringbackourgirls activist group said Amina had told her rescuers the rest of the girls were under heavy Boko Haram guard in Sambisa.

“Amina’s rescue gives us new hope and offers a unique opportunity to vital information,” Buhari said during a meeting with the teenager, her mother and officials after a presidential jet had flown her to Abuja.

He said the government would make it a priority that Amina, who showed Buhari her four-month old baby, can go back to school.

“Nobody in Nigeria should be put through the brutality of forced marriage, every girl has a right to education and their choice of life,” he said. “Amina must be able to go back to school.”

After Amina was discovered, the army said it had detained a suspected Boko Haram militant called Mohammed Hayatu, who said he was her husband.

On Thursday, the military released pictures of a clean-shaven man in a white shirt and cream trousers sitting beside Amina on a hospital bed holding the infant in his lap.

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Buhari, 73, Nigeria’s former military ruler, cradled Amina’s baby in his arms during the meeting in the lavish presidential villa before posing for a group photograph.

Amina, who was accompanied by her mother, Binta, and Nigeria’s defence minister and national security adviser, spent more than an hour with Buhari, who made crushing Boko Haram a pillar of his 2015 presidential election campaign.

More than 15,000 people have been killed and two million displaced in Nigeria and neighbouring Chad, Niger and Cameroon during its insurgency.

Under Buhari’s command, and aided by Nigeria’s neighbours, the army has recaptured most territory once lost to Boko Haram. But the jihadist group, which last year pledged loyalty to Islamic State, still regularly stages suicide bombings.

Amina’s mother said she feared she would never see her daughter again after the abduction, which had left her “broken and devastated.”

Boko Haram captured 276 girls in a night-time raid on Chibok in April 2014, its most high-profile assault.

Some girls escaped in the melee but parents of the remaining 219 accused then-President Goodluck Jonathan of not doing enough to find their daughters, whose disappearance led to a wave of global outrage. (Reporting by Lanre Ola, Ulf Laessing, Felix Onuah and Afolabi Sotunde; Writing by Ulf Laessing and Alexis Akwagyiram; Editing by Tom Heneghan and Diane Craft)

Pictures released by the Nigerian military on Thursday 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 in 2015.

However, an assertion from activist group #Bringbackourgirls that the remining abductees were under heavy Boko Haram 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 neighbouring Chad, Niger and Cameroon.

Some girls escaped in the melee 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.

Amina’s mother last year spoke of her daughter’s fear of Boko Haram but of her joy at attending school and doing well at her studies.

She told the Murtala Muhammed Foundation, a Nigerian non-profit organisation researching a book on the Chibok girls, that she was not sure of the age of Amina, the youngest of her 13 children although only three survived their early years.

“She always sewed her own clothes,” her mother said in the interview released to the Thomson Reuters Foundation by Aisha Oyebode of the Murtala Muhammed Foundation.

Binta said Amina’s father died some months after his daughter was abducted.

“After Amina was kidnapped, only two (of our children) are left alive,” she said, adding her son and daughter live in Lagos.

She said she constantly thought of her lost daughter, who had always helped her around the house.

“(My son) said I should take it easy and stop crying,” she told the Foundation. “He reminded me that I am not the only parent who lost a child.”