TheCable

Snippets of what transpired on the night that more than 300 girls were kidnapped from Government Secondary School, Chibok, are now sipping into the public domain.

According to a CNN report, a father said his daughter called him on the phone while she was being taken away by the Boko Haram insurgents in the early hours of April 15, 2014.

“Daddy, Boko Haram is here… they are taking us away. Please tell mummy I may never see her again. Tell her to pray for me,” the girl was quoted as saying.

Her identity and that of her father were not revealed, apparently to protect the family.

Parents of the victims have kept a low profile amid global campaign to free the girls whom the leader of Boko Haram, Abubakar Shekau, has threatened to sell.

A cleric also claimed in an interview with AP that two of the girls have died from snakebites and 20 had taken ill.

Lagos-based Channels TV has also shown a video of some of the girls who escaped the night the militants struck.

Three of the 53 escapees, whose faces were blurred, spoke in their local Chibuku language as well as Hausa, the lingua franca in Northern Nigeria.

The first girl revealed that she was the only person who escaped within the school premises just before the others were taken away in trucks.

She said: “I was the only person who escaped from the school. When I observed that the men were a bit harsh, I became suspicious. I ran and jumped the fence. Then I claimed a tree close to the school and stayed there. One of the men followed me with a torchlight and asked me to return but I did not answer him.”

Another escapee said: “We were told to gather in a place, that nothing will happen to us. They also asked for the store where food is kept. We took them there and they took all the food and asked us to move to the gate. They then set the school on fire and moved us into the trucks.

“We were on the road for hours, then we got there by 2am. I then made up my mind to escape, that God should help me. I and another girl started running towards the bush in the dark.”

The third girl said: “They brought a big truck and a small one and told us to climb into the trucks. They then started moving into the bush. We got somewhere. We saw people coming down in the forest, then decided to escape. We started running for hours, then we saw fire, went close and saw a Fulani man who helped us and brought us to town.”

Initially when the incident happened, military authorities said 200 of the girls had returned.

It turned out that only 53 returned and the figure of those in captivity is still estimated at 276, but there are still no accurate records of the victims.