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| Members of the "Bring Back Our Girls" movement hold a banner showing photos of some of the missing, on January 14, 2016 |
Boko Haram has sent a
"proof of life" video which shows 15 of the more than 200 girls
abducted by Islamist fighters from the northeast Nigerian town of Chibok two
years ago, CNN reported.
Multiple
sources report:
The
video showed the girls wearing black hijabs in an unspecified location, stating
their names, that they were taken from Chibok and the date of the recording --
December 25, 2015.
The
report claims two of three mothers of the 219 schoolgirls still missing since
the mass abduction on April 14, 2014 recognized their daughters on the video
but another broke down as hers was not there.
All
three, however, identified all the girls, as did a classmate, who was at home
on the day of the kidnapping.
The
video is the first concrete indication that at least some of the girls are
still alive since a previous video released publicly by Boko Haram in May 2014.
Then,
about 100 of the teenagers were shown in Islamic dress, reciting passages from
the Koran after Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau said they had converted to
Islam.
Nigeria's
information minister Lai Mohammed told CNN the girls in the video appeared
"under no stress whatsoever" and there had been "little
transformation in their physical appearance".
But
he declined to comment directly on the state of talks with Boko Haram, which
has previously said it would release the girls only in exchange for captured
fighters in Nigerian prisons.
"There
are ongoing talks. We cannot ignore leads but of course many of these
investigations cannot be disclosed openly because it could also endanger the
negotiations," the minister added.
- Prisoner swap -
AFP
understands from a go-between that in mid-January this year, members of Boko
Haram made contact with the government, requesting talks about a possible
prisoner swap.
The
militants then sent five still photographs of some of the girls, also wearing
black hijabs, who were identified by some parents as being among those
kidnapped from Chibok.
The
government then requested more concrete proof in the form of a video, which was
then sent.
Parents
of the 219 girls were on Thursday set to hold a prayer vigil at the Government
Girls Secondary School in Chibok to mark the second anniversary of the
kidnapping.
Boko
Haram seized 276 from their dormitories but 57 managed to escape in the hours
that followed.
Amnesty
International's Nigeria director M.K. Ibrahim called for the release of all
captives and said the Chibok girls symbolised "all the civilians whose
lives have been devastated by Boko Haram".
"(President)
Muhammadu Buhari's government should do all it lawfully can to bring an end to
the agony of the parents of the Chibok girls and all those abducted," he
added.
- Two year anniversary -
Nnamdi
Obasi and Ayo Obe, of the International Crisis Group, described the anniversary
was an opportunity to address the conflict's effect on children as more areas
are freed from Boko Haram's control.
"The
currently haphazard approach to the rehabilitation of rescued captives has left
most of them psychologically, socially and culturally vulnerable," they
added in an article published on blog.crisisgroup.org.
Human
Rights Watch said this week some 952,000 of the 2.6 million people displaced by
the violence were children, who had been "robbed" of their right to
education by attacks on schools.
UNICEF
said separately there had been a sharp rise in the use of abducted children as
human bombs. Three-quarters of the child bombers in attacks from January 2014
to February 2016 were girls.
Elsewhere
in Nigeria, protest marches were planned as the culmination of a week-long
series of events organized by the #BringBackOurGirls movement to renew calls
for the girls' release.
The
Chibok girls are the most high-profile victims of the brutal insurgency, which
has seen Boko Haram repeatedly use kidnapping as a weapon in a war that has
killed some 20,000 people since 2009.
Human
rights groups estimate that several thousand women and young girls have been
seized since the start of the insurgency, and forced to become sex slaves and
suicide bombers.
Young boys and men have
also been forcibly conscripted to fight for the rebels, who want to create a hard-line Islamic state in northeast Nigeria.
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