Six of the Nigerian schoolgirls who escaped Boko Haram kidnappers last month More than 300 girls were abducted on April 15 2014, from t...
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| Six of the Nigerian schoolgirls who escaped Boko Haram kidnappers last month |
These escaped girls speaking to Borno state officials on May 5 during the exercise to identify their school mates in the video, which was claimed to be released by Boko Haram, really gave out the whole story.
Here is a story of from the three girls among the 53 escaped the captors at Sambisa Forest.
These escaped girls describes how they were kidnapped and how they managed to escape their captors.
The unnamed schoolgirls, who were among the 276 children kidnapped in April, revealed that after being snatched from their boarding school, they were transported in a convoy of lorries to the forest.
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| Godiya Simon |
Godiya Simon one of these three girls said that she asked her captors that she wanted to urinate.
Her excuse did not work at first instance.
The kindnapers showed smartnace at the begining. So they refuted her request but by her persistence on requesting, they later allowed her to go along with three others.
That is how they escaped the camp.
When asked how did she know that the place they took them to was the Sambisa Forest she said it was from Boko Haram militant's discussion. " We heard them (The Boko Haram)," Godiya said.
When asked if she can show the way to Sambisa? she said,
"No, I do not think I will know, you know we travelled at night. When we went to urinate, we started running. We were too scared, we just kept running, believing that with God on our side, we would get help."
She said they couldn't manage to come back to Chibok had they not got a help of a Fulani herdsman.
"After a long way from the forest we met a Fulani herdsman who assisted us out of the bush and onto the main road where we found vehicles back to Chibok," Godiya Simon said.
"What brought you to Maiduguri today?" The repoter of Nigerian Punch asked
"We were told to come in order to watch a video which was said to have been released by Boko Haram so that we can tell them if the girls in the video are from our school." Godiya Simon answered.
And when asked if she had watched the video and recognised any of the girls she said;
"Yes, we have watched it and there are many of our schoolmates there."
She added saying that she had a little bit of happiness within her seeing the video and she believed that her mates would come back alive like she did.
When asked how she felt seeing some of her mates reciting the Holy Koran, Godiya Simon said.
"It makes me feel sad knowing that they must have been forced to recite the Koran. I know four of the girls to be good Christians that will never accept to change their faith. It is sad that they have been forced to become Muslims."
One of the girls revealed she was shot at by a gunman as she fled, having been sent to fetch water.
Another revealed how she and a friend jumped from one of the moving lorries as it slowed down. They spent a night in the bush before making their way back to their village, Chibok.
"They took us away in a convoy of lorries," explained one of the girls.
"We travelled through the night before reaching the final destination in the forest. The following day we were sent to fetch water. That was when we seized the opportunity and bolted.
"Even when they were shooting at us, we took the chance and God helped us arrive in Chibok two days later," she said.
The second girl added: "They threatened to shoot anyone who tried to escape.
As the vehicle slowed down along the road I jumped down with my friend. We spent the night in the bush and trekked back to Chibok the next day,"another said.
More related stories;
Tales of Escapees in Nigeria Add to Worries About Other Kidnapped Girls.
MAIDUGURI, Nigeria — Among the lucky ones, there are pensive smiles but not much laughter.
When the militants came to their school, the men shouted “Allahu akbar!” and announced, “We are Boko Haram,” firing their rifles and threatening casually to kill the teenage girls studying there.
“They said: ‘If you want to die, sit down here. We will kill you. If you don’t want to die, you will enter the trucks,’ ” narrated Kuma Ishaku, a soft-spoken 18-year-old in a bright white blouse with silver sparkles. "Frightened and crying, the girls boarded the trucks."
But then Ms. Ishaku fled — one of 53 girls from the Chibok Government Girls Secondary School who escaped their captors.
More than 260 schoolgirls are still missing, and on Wednesday, President Goodluck Jonathan of Nigeria rejected Boko Haram’s demand that he free the group’s imprisoned members around the country in exchange for the girls, according to a British minister who met with him.
The girls’ accounts are emblematic of the ruthlessness of Boko Haram, adding to the worries over the fate of those who remain in captivity if the president has ruled out a deal to free them.
Some of the schoolgirls who escaped jumped from the trucks taking them through the bush, trying to persuade reluctant classmates to follow them. Others slipped away from the Islamists’ camp while their captors were distracted.
The teenage girls wandered directionless in the thick semidesert scrub before kind strangers took them in and back to their village.
They fled after quickly calculating that risking death was better than the grim existence their captors were undoubtedly planning for them. All of them knew about Boko Haram.
Their village, Chibok, 80 miles from this state capital, at the end of a dirt track, had been attacked before, like virtually every other village around. The girls said they wanted no part of it.
“Yes, yes, I ran into the bush,” said Joy Bishara, a tall 18-year-old in a brown T-shirt with “Ice Box” on the front. She jumped from one of the trucks as it slowed down.
“I don’t know where I was going,” Ms. Bishara said, recalling her hasty reasoning that night. “I think they will kill me. They were telling us, ‘We will kill you.’ ”
Six of the girls who escaped came up to Maiduguri this week to watch the Boko Haram video showing dozens of their captured schoolmates.
The governor here in the heart of the Boko Haram insurgency had asked for the girls’ help in naming the teenagers in the video.
Well over 70 of the girls on screen have been identified, the governor says, but for the ones who escaped, seeing their friends shrouded in the austere black and gray head scarves and robes the militants imposed was deeply unsettling.
“When we saw them in the movie, we started crying,” said Godiya Simon, 17, who escaped from the Boko Haram camp.
Outside a villa here on the sandy grounds of the worn but cheerful Borno State Hotel, three of the girls quietly told their stories of escape, barely aware that a global spotlight had been fixed on them.
The girls, dressed in vivid shades of green, blue, red and orange — a sharp contrast to the Islamists’ black — brushed off suggestions of exceptional courage.
“We woke up and we saw people in military uniforms,” said Ms. Ishaku, who, like many of the students, had come in from an outlying area and was sleeping at the school that night, April 14, when she heard the sound of gunfire.
“We thought they were army men,” she said. “They were telling us: ‘Come, come. We are army.’ ”
The girls were told to gather in one spot, but Ms. Ishaku knew something was wrong when the men began barking: “Where do you keep your food? Where is your staff room?”
They seemed especially interested in a device the school kept for making mud bricks. “ ‘Where is the engine for preparing bricks? If you don’t tell us, we will kill you,’ ” Ms. Bishara recalled the men saying.
The men spoke Kanuri, the language of the dominant ethnic group of the Muslims of Maiduguri. Most of the Chibok residents are Christians of a small minority group who speak Kibaku, another of Nigeria’s myriad languages.
“They told us: ‘We are Boko Haram. We will burn your school. You shall not do school again,’ ” Ms. Bishara said. “ ‘You shall do Islamic school.’ And they were shouting, ‘Allahu akbar!’ ” — “God is great!”
There was coaxing among the threats. “They were saying, ‘Don’t worry; we will not touch you,’ ” Ms. Simon said, adding that the men told them, “ ‘We will take you to our masters.’ ”
But the men were not wasting time on indoctrination on this night.
That would come later, as evidenced by the video released this week, in which the girls who did not escape were seen mechanically chanting verses from the Quran.
Source.International Business
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