Most of the 110 schoolgirls
kidnapped last month in Nigeria by the terror group Boko Haram have been
released and returned to their hometown of Dap chi, a Nigerian minister said
Wednesday.
According to an ongoing head
count,104 of the girls abducted by militants from their boarding school
on February 19 were "dropped off" Wednesday in Dap chi in northeast
Nigeria, Minister of Information and Culture Alhaji Lai Mohammed said in a
statement.
Those schoolgirls and one boy were
among those returned early Wednesday, the minister said.
"He was also picked from the
school," he said of the boy. "I don't know what he was doing
there."
The schoolgirls were later flown to
the capital, Abuja, where they are expected to meet the Nigerian president,
Muhammadu Buhari.
The minister of information said no
ransom was paid to free the Dap chi schoolgirls and said their release
"came with no conditions."
"The only thing they asked for
was that they should be the ones to drop them off. They didn't want to hand
them over to any third party. Nothing was given in exchange for them,"
Mohammed said.
He said the students had been freed
"The government had a clear
understanding that violence and confrontation would not be the way out as it
could endanger the lives of the girls," he added.
''What happened was that the
abduction itself was a breach of the ceasefire talks between the insurgents and
the government; hence it became a moral burden on the abductors. Any report
that we paid ransom or engaged in prisoner swap is false,'' he said at a media
briefing with journalists in Maiduguri, Borno State, on Wednesday afternoon.
Mohammed told CNN he could not
confirm reports that five of the girls died while in captivity and said he was
awaiting additional briefings.
Kachalla Bukar said his
daughter Aisha, 14, who was among those freed, told him that five girls had
died.
Bukar said the girls were seen
walking into Dapchi at about 7:30 a.m. local time Wednesday.
"We were present when they
dropped them (off). Some people even went to snap photos with them.
"They apologized to the
villagers," Bukar told CNN.
" 'Don't take your girls to
that school again if you don't want us to kidnap them again,' " Bukar
quoted the militants as saying.
He said his daughter told him they
left a Boko Haram camp on Saturday to make the journey to Dap chi.
"Parents are rejoicing here,
but we can see they have suffered," Bukar said.
Another parent told CNN his daughter
Fatima, 14, was in such a poor state that she was unable to stand up when he
saw her.
Her father, Bashir Manzo, who's the
head of a parents' association for the missing girls, told CNN: "We have
admitted her at the hospital," Manzo said. "It's mixed feeling of joy
and pain in Dapchi town. Parents who have not seen their daughters are
anxious."
Adamu Alhaji-Deri was observing
early morning prayers Wednesday when he learned his daughter Ummi, 14, had been
found.
"I am so happy because Ummi is
fine," he told CNN. "We are all celebrating."
The mass kidnapping brought back
painful memories of the 2014 Boko Haram abduction of nearly 300 girls from a
separate school in Chibok, 170 miles southeast of Dapchi. More than 100 of them
President Buhari described the
kidnappings in Dap chi as a "national disaster" and deployed troops
and surveillance aircraft in search of the missing students.
"Let me assure that our gallant
armed forces will locate and safely return all the missing girls," Buhari
said in a statement on Twitter in February.
But an Amnesty International report
on the kidnappings released this week accused the Nigerian army of failing to act on advance warnings of the
raid.
According to the report, at
least five phone calls were allegedly made to the army and police on the
afternoon of the attack, warning the Boko Haram militants were on their way to
the school.
"The Nigerian authorities must
investigate the inexcusable security lapses that allowed this abduction to take
place without any tangible attempt to prevent it," said Osai Ojigho,
Amnesty International's Nigeria director.
Nigerian army spokesman John Agim
told CNN the allegations weren't true and the army had not been informed.
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