Nigeria Boko Haram crisis: ’20 women abducted’ in north

Suspected Boko Haram militants have abducted at least 20 women close to where 200 schoolgirls were kidnapped in northern Nigeria, eyewitnesses say.

The women were loaded onto vans at gunpoint and driven away to an unknown location in Borno state, they add.

The army has not commented on the incident, which occurred on the nomadic Garkin Fulani settlement on Thursday.

The Nigerian military has faced mounting criticism for failing to stop militant attacks in the north-east.

Despite a state of emergency in place in the region, residents say the army is largely inactive or even absent, allowing the Boko Haram militants to continue their attacks.

The group has waged an increasingly bloody insurgency since 2009 in an attempt to create an Islamic state in Nigeria – and thousands of people have died in their attacks and the subsequent security crackdown.

‘Too late’

The latest incident occurred close to where more than 200 schoolgirls were snatched from the remote Chibok village near the Cameroonian border on 14 April.

A member of a local vigilante group set up to resist such attacks said that in addition to the women, the militants also seized three men who had tried to stop the abduction.

“We tried to go after them when the news got to us about three hours later, but the vehicles we have could not go far, and the report came to us a little bit late,” Alhaji Tar said.

The government has been facing growing pressure both at home and abroad to do more to tackle Boko Haram since the abduction of the schoolgirls.

On Monday, the military announced it had killed 50 insurgents in anti-terrorism operations in recent days and prevented further Islamist raids on villages in Borno and neighbouring Adamawa state.

It follows a wave of militant attacks on villages in recent days, with as many as 200 people feared killed in one attack alone in the remote Gwoza area of Borno state.

A new report by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre and the Norwegian Refugee Council says 3,300 people have been killed by Boko Haram this year alone.

The UK government is due to host a ministerial meeting about northern Nigeria’s security in London on 12 June, following on from last month’s summit in Paris about tackling Boko Haram.

BBC News

UM– USEKE.RW