Some of the 200 kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls sold into marriage

Scores of young girls and women kidnapped from a school in Nigeria are being forced to marry their Boko Haram abductors, a local human rights group has reported.

Halite Aliyu, of the Borno-Yobe People’s Forum, told the Associated Press on Wednesday that more than 200 girls who were kidnapped two weeks ago had been sold to the fighters for $12.

Aliyu said the information given about the mass weddings was coming from villagers in the Sambisa Forest, on Nigeria’s border with Cameroon where Boko Haram was known to have a number of hideouts.

"The latest reports are that they have been taken across the borders, some to Cameroon and Chad,'' Aliyu said.

It was not possible to verify the reports.

Community elder Pogu Bitrus of Chibok town, from where the girls were abducted, told the BBC's Hausa service that some of the kidnapped girls "have been married off to insurgents".

"A medieval kind of slavery. You go and capture women and then sell them off,'' Bitrus said.

At the same time, the Boko Haram network was reportedly negotiating over the students' fate and demanding an unspecified ransom for their release, a Borno state civic leader told The Associated Press. The abductors have also claimed that two of the girls have died from snake bites.

Information regarding the girls’ exact whereabouts still remains unclear.

About 50 of the kidnapped girls managed to escape from the captors in the first days after their abduction, but some 220 remained missing, according to the principal of the Chibok Girls Secondary School, Asabe Kwambura. They are between 16 and 18 years old and had been recalled to the school to write a physics exam.

"Find Our Daughters"

The government and military's failure to rescue the girls prompted Nigerian protesters to march on the country's parliament on Wednesday.

The march, dubbed "A Million-Woman March" was promoted on Twitter and attracted several hundred women and men, mostly dressed in red, carrying placards that read "Find Our Daughters".

Parents have voiced fury at the military's rescue operation, accusing the security services of ignoring their daughters' plight.

Former World Bank vice president and ex-Nigerian cabinet member Obiageli Ezekwesili, addressed protesters at Unity Fountain in Abuja as the march kicked off.

She accused the military of having "no coherent search-and-rescue" plan. 

"If this happened anywhere else in the world, more than 200 girls kidnapped and no information for more than two weeks, the country would be brought to a standstill," she told AFP.

The protest underscored how large parts of northeastern Nigeria remained beyond the control of the government.

Until the kidnappings, the air force had been mounting near-daily bombing raids since mid-January on the Sambisa Forest and mountain caves bordering Chad.

Aliyu said that in northeastern Nigeria "life has become nasty, short and brutish.

"We are living in a state of anarchy.''

Aljazeera

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kidnapped school girls believed to have been taken out of Nigeria

Some of the schoolgirls abducted by suspected militant Islamists in northern Nigeria are believed to have been taken to neighbouring states, a local leader has told the BBC.

Pogo Bitrus said there had been "sightings" of gunmen crossing with the girls into Cameroon and Chad.

Some of the girls had been forced to marry the militants, he added.

Mr Bitrus said 230 girls were missing since militants attacked the school in Chibok, Borno state, two weeks ago.

The Islamist group Boko Haram has been blamed for the night-time raid on the school hostel in Chibok town. It has not yet commented.

Mr Bitrus, a Chibok community leader, said 43 of the girls had "regained their freedom" after escaping, while 230 were still in captivity. This is a higher number than previous estimates, however he was adamant it was the correct figure.

"Some of them have been taken across Lake Chad and some have been ferried across the border into parts of Cameroon," he told the BBC.

"And then we got this information that the captors went and auctioned these girls into marriage for a bride price," he added.

The students were about to sit their final year exam and so are mostly aged 16-18.

Boko Haram has staged a wave of attacks in northern Nigeria in recent years, with an estimated 1,500 killed this year alone.

BBC

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