Chibok girls’ parents meet Nigerian president – Over 700 missing after army clashes: shiite group

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ABUJA, Jan 15, (AFP): Hundreds of parents and sympathisers of more than 200 schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram Islamists in northeast Nigeria on Thursday met President Muhammadu Buhari to renew calls for their release. The 300 or so marchers, many of them crying, trekked through Abuja carrying signs with the faces of the missing girls before being taken in buses for an audience with Buhari at his official residence. It is the first time the group has met Buhari since he declared in December that the extremists were “technically” defeated, despite warnings from security analysts the war was far from over. “Where is my daughter? I want my daughter back no matter the condition she is in,” Iyana Galan, a mother, said to AFP. “Even if she is dead I want to see her body,” she said, choking back tears.

After the behind-closed-doors meeting, former education minister Oby Ezekwesili, who leads the BringBackOurGirls protest group, said Buhari asked for more time to rescue the 219 schoolgirls.

A total of 276 teenagers were seized from their dormitories at the school in Chibok, in the northeastern state of Borno, on April 14, 2014. Fifty-seven girls managed to escape soon afterwards but the remainder are still being held and have not been seen since they appeared in a Boko Haram video message released in May, 2014.

The audacious kidnapping generated headlines worldwide and laid bare the inability of Buhari’s predecessor Goodluck Jonathan to tackle the insurrection. Since 2009, at least 17,000 have been killed and some 2.6 million forced from their homes. Meanwhile, a Nigerian Shiite Muslim group on Thursday said more than 700 of its members were unaccounted for, nearly a month after clashes with the army in the northern city of Zaria. “In our list there are about 730 people, men and women, who are still missing, since that fateful Saturday December 12, 2015,” spokesman for the Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN), Ibrahim Musa, in an emailed statement. “These missing people were either killed by the army or are in detention” but their “whereabouts are still unknown and undisclosed”. Some 220 IMN members were in Kaduna city prison, while others were reportedly in military custody elsewhere in Kaduna state, the northeastern state of Bauchi and the capital, Abuja, he added.

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