Protesters urge Nigeria to step up hunt for girls abducted by Islamists

ABUJA/MAIDUGURI (Reuters) – Dozens of protesters gathered outside Nigeria’s parliament on Wednesday called on security forces to search harder for 200 schoolgirls abducted by Islamist militants in the war-ravaged northeast over two weeks ago.

Scores of suspected Boko Haram gunmen stormed an all-girls secondary school in the village of Chibok, in Borno state, on April 14, packing the teenagers onto trucks and disappearing into a remote, hilly area along the Cameroon border.

The demonstrators, including pregnant women, relatives of the girls and civil servants, waved banners saying “Bring Back Our Girls”, the somber mood of their rally accentuated by torrential rain that drenched everyone.

“If 230 girls can go missing for this long and nobody knows how to find them, then something’s very wrong with our country,” said Tokumbo Adebanjo, 45, a travel agent and mother.

“I feel the pain of those other mothers. Obviously the government are not doing their job.”

Boko Haram rebels have killed thousands in the past year.

The scale and brutality of the school attack shocked a nation already long used to hearing about atrocities in an increasingly bloody, five-year-old Islamist insurgency.

The abduction has also become a symbol of the military’s impotence in protecting civilians against Islamist insurgents whose attacks appear to be getting less discriminating.

President Goodluck Jonathan has said security forces are doing all they can to find the girls, aged between 15 and 18.

“All the girls must be brought back alive in the shortest time possible and only then will we believe them,” Lawan Aban, a lawyer, who has two nieces and a sister missing.

“We have lost faith in the Nigerian authorities.”

The demonstrators began their march outside the Hilton Abuja, one of Africa’s most expensive hotels, where in a week’s time Nigeria will be hosting the World Economic Forum (WEF) under tight security, to be maintained by 6,000 soldiers.

These four students were among those who managed to escape after being abducted

BOMB ATTACK IN ABUJA ON SAME DAY

On the day the schoolgirls were seized, a bomb blast also blamed on Boko Haram killed 75 people on the edge of the capital Abuja, the first attack on the city in two years.

“The Chibok community has been wiped out by Boko Haram,” Tsambido Hosea, whose daughter is among the kidnapped, said at the gates of the national assembly. “We are in agony.”

Britain’s foreign office confirmed on Tuesday it had offered support to Nigeria to help find the girls, but gave no details of what it might do – or whether the offer had been accepted.

Boko Haram’s struggle to revive a medieval Islamic caliphate in the north has become the main security threat to Africa’s top energy producer and threatens to overshadow its investor appeal as a dynamic economy, now Africa’s biggest, and consumer market.

“There is no doubt our nation is at war,” Senate President David Mark told parliament on Tuesday, calling for Nigerians to unite against the Islamists.

As speculation about the girls’ whereabouts grew, Senator Ahmad Zannah from Borno state said in parliament on Tuesday that the girls had been taken as “wives” by Boko Haram commanders – a grim echo of Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army, which abducted thousands of girls from central Africa for the same purpose.

A military source involved in the hunt for the girls said they were believed to be in the Sambisa forest, a known Boko Haram base. Halilu Chibok, whose daughter is among the rebels, said his wife cried all the time and could no longer eat after hearing her daughter may have been married to a militant.

“Why can’t the government invite other countries to help?” the chairman of the school’s parents association, Dumona Mpur, said by telephone from Chibok, which he said was half-deserted.

“If the world can search for a missing Malaysian (airliner), why can’t the president ask them to help look for these children?”

Nigeria girls’ abduction: Chibok parents plead for help

Parents of the 230 schoolgirls abducted in north-eastern Nigeria have marched to plead for more help to find their daughters, residents in the town of Chibok have told the BBC.

The girls were taken from their school in Chibok by suspected Islamist militants more than two weeks ago.

One parent, who asked not to be named, said they were grateful for the support of Nigerians, as other marches are held to put pressure on the authorities.

“We want to see more effort,” she said.

The Islamist group Boko Haram has not made any response to the accusation that its fighters abducted the girls in the middle of the night on 14 April 2014.

“Nobody is saying GEJ [President Jonathan] should grab a gun and go into Sambisa forest. All we are asking him is to show concern”

The group, whose name means “Western education is forbidden” in the local Hausa language, has staged a wave of attacks in northern Nigeria in recent years, with an estimated 1,500 killed in the violence and subsequent security crackdown this year alone.

‘Discreet’ mission
On Wednesday, several hundred people, mainly women, dressed in red braved heavy rain to march to the National Assembly in the capital, Abuja, to hand over a letter to complain that the government was not doing enough to secure the release of the girls.

“We thank the women for their support,” the parent in Chibok told the BBC Hausa service, saying such marches might push the government to make more of an effort to locate the girls.

“We are pleading for others who are outside… to please come and help us, because the burden is too much for us parents,” she said.

As she spoke, crying and wailing could be heard from others marching through Chibok.

She said that she was desperate to know what had happened to her daughter and that a dead body was better than no body at all.

Earlier, Nigeria’s Interior Minister Abba Moro told the BBC that he understood the “outpouring of emotions”, but the government could not divulge details of what it was doing to secure the release of the girls.

It had to act in a “discreet” way because the militants had threatened to kill the girls if “certain steps” were taken, he said.

He accused opposition parties of politicising the crisis and said they should work with the government rather than criticise it.

Following the march in Abuja, more than 20 senators requested a meeting with President Goodluck Jonathan. They met on Wednesday night but no details of their discussions are known.

Swathes of north-eastern Nigeria are, in effect, off limits to the military, allowing the militants to move the girls towards, or perhaps even across, the country’s borders with impunity, says the BBC’s Will Ross in Abuja.