26, February 2018
Nigeria: Buhari administration confirms 110 girls missing after militant raid on Dapchi school 0
Nigeria has confirmed another mass kidnapping of schoolgirls in the militancy-riddled northeast, saying it has deployed extra troops and planes to search for over 100 girls, who remain missing following a Boko Haram raid on their school last week.
Militants on February 19 drove into the town of Dapchi in northeastern Yobe State in trucks and attacked the school, causing students and teachers to flee into the surrounding bush.
It is not known how the girls were abducted, but witnesses say some of the attackers were camouflaged, making the students mistake them for army soldiers.
Government and police officials have been giving contradictory figures of those missing, with estimates ranging from 50 to 100.
The Yobe State government also added to the confusion on Wednesday, when it said dozens of the abducted girls had been rescued, prompting many locals, including the parents of the missing girls, in Dapchi to celebrate.
The next day, however, the local administration apologized for the “erroneous” statement, which it said had been based on inaccurate information.
Finally, the Nigerian Information Ministry on Sunday put an end to confusion and acknowledged that 110 girls are missing in a statement based on numbers obtained from parents who said their girls had not returned home since the school raid.
“The federal government has confirmed that 110 students of the Government Science and Technical College in Dapchi, Yobe State, are so far unaccounted for, after insurgents believed to be from a faction of Boko Haram invaded their school on Monday,” the statement said.
The statement said 906 students were in the school on the day of the attack.
Information Minister Lai Mohammed said additional security officials have been deployed to schools in the state.
The Nigerian Air Force also said the chief of air staff had “directed the immediate deployment of additional air assets and Nigerian Air Force personnel to the northeast with the sole mission of conducting day and night searches for the missing girls” in coordination with the ground forces.
The latest kidnappings have revived the painful memories of another mass abduction in April 2014, when Boko Haram militants attacked a girl school and kidnapped 294 girls in Chibok, Borno State. Many of the girls were released after negotiations, but more than 100 remain in captivity, their whereabouts unknown.
There has been growing anger among locals over the government’s handling of the recent incident as well as reports that soldiers had been withdrawn from key checkpoints in Dapchi last month.
The Nigerian government has claimed in the past that Boko Haram was defeated, but the Takfiri outfit continues to vex especially in the country’s restive northeast.
The Takfiri Boko Haram militant group has killed more than 20,000 people and forced two million to flee their homes since the onset of its terror campaign in 2009. It pledged allegiance Daesh in 2015.
Source: Presstv
3, March 2018
Nigeria: Mass abduction in Dapchi dents Buhari’s security record 0
When President Muhammadu Buhari took office three years ago, eradicating Boko Haram militants and rescuing the hundreds of women and children they held captive was one of the main pledges in his inaugural address.
Another mass abduction of schoolgirls in the town of Dapchi has exposed how little progress has been made. It also shows that security is a major weakness for the former military ruler with less than a year to go before elections.
“The government is not doing sufficiently well as it relates to security because if they are, an experience like that of Chibok that happened four years ago, we had four years to prevent the recurrence of Chibok. Yet four years after we still have Dapchi, and not just that one or two girls or five girls, over a hundred girls were taken in one night.” Bukky Shonibare, a member of the Bring Back Our Girls Group
The kidnap of the 110 girls, mostly aged 11-19, almost two weeks ago bears similarities to Boko Haram’s 2014 abduction of more than 270 schoolgirls from Chibok.
“I voted for Buhari for change, but sincerely right now, the way things are, we are going backward and not forward. Before I used to come out in confidence, but now I come out in shame. If we find good change, I want Buhari but with the way things are, if it continues like this, I will not vote for Buhari.” Idris Mohammed, a generator repairer.
Buhari has declared the Dapchi abduction a “national disaster”.
Source: Reuters