More than 50 Chibok girls ‘seen three weeks ago’

About 50 of the Chibok schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram on April 14, 2014, were seen some three weeks ago in Gwoza, a community in Borno state.

According to BBC, a woman who lived under Boko Haram’s rule in Gwoza, said she saw the girls in Islamic attires, being escorted by the militants after they were driven out by regional forces.

“They said they were Chibok girls kept in a big house,” said the woman, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals.

“We just happened to be on the same road with them.”

Gwoza was seized by the sect last year and turned into an Islamic Caliphate until security forces chased the insurgents out of the town in March.

Earlier in March, Mbutu Papka, a woman who had just regained her freedom after eight months in the sect’s captivity, had said the girls were in Gwoza and alive.

Speaking with the international centre for investigative reporting, she stated that she was transferred from a poor condition in Mdita to a fairly tolerable in Gwoza where the abducted girls were being held.

“In the camp at Gwoza, there were clear demarcations between where people were kept. The Chibok girls, other captives and Boko Haram members and their family members all had their separate areas secured, though the security in the area where the girls are kept is visibly different and much tigher security,” she had said.

Since last year when they were taken into captivity, there have been different reports on their whereabouts.

Boko Haram stormed Government Secondary School, Chibok, in the night of April 14 and took hold of about 278 students after hours of operating unchallenged.

However, some lucky students managed to escape when one of the vehicles conveying them developed a fault. A few others escaped from Sambisa forest some days later.

The Bring Back Our Girls Movement (BBOG) started a campaign that sparked global outrage, but all efforts to secure the release of the girls have amounted to naught.