Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Boko Haram Hijinks

I really can't remember the last time I flagged down the missing Nigerian girls:

"Nigeria: Report Chibok girl freed, identity doubts" Associated Press   September 26, 2014

ABUJA, Nigeria — Nigeria’s Islamic extremists have freed one of the kidnapped Chibok schoolgirls, Nigerian police reported Thursday, but a community leader says she’s too traumatized to identify herself properly.

Hundreds of girls, women, and boys have been kidnapped by Boko Haram fighters in the past year but the abduction of more than 270 schoolgirls and young women from a school in the remote northeastern town of Chibok in April inspired a worldwide campaign for their freedom.

More than 50 girls escaped by themselves at the scene or soon after and now 219 remain missing. The failure by the Nigerian government and military to rescue them has brought international condemnation.

Police spokesman Emmanuel Ojukwu told reporters that on Wednesday ‘‘a girl, 20 years of age, among the abducted Chibok girls was dropped off by suspected Boko Haram militants at Mubi,’’ a town in northeast Adamawa state.

‘‘The information we have is that she is one of the abducted girls,’’ he said.

But Chibok community leader Pogu Bitrus said he spoke to the young woman by phone and that the name she gave is not on the list of missing girls. ‘‘She is mentally traumatized, not coherent at all,’’ he said.

He has asked security forces to send him a photograph so that parents may look at it and her image can be compared with a database of photographs of the missing students.

Bitrus also worried that ‘‘it could be a trick by Boko Haram to release another girl just to create a diversion.’’

The whole scripted and staged fraud was a tricky diversion.

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