FG May Consider Amnesty For Boko Haram Prisoners – Buhari

President Buhari shakes hands with his host, Francois Hollande of France

President Muhammadu Buhari said on Wednesday that Nigerian authorities were talking to Boko Haram prisoners in their custody and could offer them amnesty if the sect hands over more than 200 schoolgirls abducted last year. Buhari added that he was confident “conventional” attacks by the insurgents would be rooted out by November — but cautioned that deadly suicide attacks, some of them waged by children, were likely to continue.

“The few (prisoners) we are holding, we are trying to see whether we can negotiate with them for the release of the Chibok girls,” Buhari told AFP in an interview in Paris during a three-day visit to France.

“If the Boko Haram leadership eventually agrees to turn over the Chibok girls to us, the complete number, then we may decide to give them (the prisoners) amnesty.”

News Agency of Nigeria reports:

Boko Haram fighters stormed a school in Chibok, Borno State, on April 14 last year, seizing 276 girls who were preparing for end-of-year exams in an abduction that shocked the world.

57 girls later escaped, but nothing has been heard of the 219 others since May last year, when about 100 of them appeared in a Boko Haram video, dressed in Muslim attire and reciting the Koran.

Boko Haram leader, Abubakar Shekau, has since said they have all converted to Islam and been “married off.”

Buhari, who has promised to stamp out the group’s bloody six-year insurgency, said the government would not release any prisoners unless it was convinced it could “get the girls in reasonably healthy condition.”

But he cautioned that negotiating with Boko Haram militants was fraught with difficulties.

“We are trying to establish if they are bona fide, how useful they are in Boko Haram, have they reached a position of leadership where their absence is of relevance to the operation of Boko Haram,” he said.