Chibok girls: Boko Haram came for robbery… our kidnap was accidental

The Chibok girls kidnapped by Boko Haram insurgents say their abduction was just an accident as the sect members had a different agenda when they visited the school.

According to the Thomson Reuters Foundation, Naomi Adamu, one of the 82 girls released by the sect in May, revealed this in secret diaries kept by the girls while in captivity.

Adamu, 24, described in the diary, which is written in English with scribbling in Hausa, how members of the sect had come to their school to steal machinery for house building but when they failed to find what they came for, decided to abduct the girls.

“One boy said they should burn us all, and they (some of the other fighters) said: ‘No, let us take them with us to Sambisa (Boko Haram’s remote forest base) … if we take them to Shekau (the group’s leader), he will know what to do'”, Adamu wrote.

She also related the horrible experiences the girls went through while in captivity.

According to her, the girls said they started documenting their ordeal a few months after the abduction, when their abductors gave them exercise books to use during Koranic lessons.

She said Boko Haram members threatened to burn them alive if they refused to convert to Islam, adding that those who tried to escape were whipped and threatened with decapitation.

She added that her friend, Sarah Samuel, who co-wrote the diary with her, had to get married to one of the boys due to hunger and thirst.

Adamu, who is now in the state safe house in the capital, where the girls are being kept for assessment, rehabilitation and debriefing by the government, said, “we wrote it together. When one person got tired, she would give it to another person to continue.”

“They said: ‘You want to die. You don’t want to be Muslim, (so) we are going to burn you,” the diary read.

“We are begging them. We are crying. They said if next we ran away, they are going to cut off our necks.”

Reuters, however, said it could not confirm the authenticity of the diaries, written by Adamu and  Samuel.

Out of the 276 girls abducted in April 2014 from their school in Chibok, Borno state, 113 girls are yet to be released.