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SCORES OF SCHOOLGIRLS kidnapped from a school in Nigeria are being forced to marry their Islamic extremist abductors, a civic organisation has reported.
At the same time, the Boko Haram terrorist network is negotiating over the students’ fate and is demanding an unspecified ransom for their release, according to a community leader.
He said the Wednesday night message from the abductors also claimed that two of the girls have died from snake bites.
The message was sent to a member of a presidential committee mandated last year to mediate a ceasefire with the Islamic extremists, said the civic leader, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorised to speak about the talks.
The news of negotiations comes as parents say the girls are being sold into marriage to Boko Haram militants. The students are being paid 2,000 naira (€10) to marry the fighters, Halite Aliyu of the Borno-Yobe People’s Forum told The Associated Press.
‘Medieval kind of slavery’
She said the parents’ information about mass weddings is coming from villagers in the Sambisa Forest, on Nigeria’s border with Cameroon, where Boko Haram is known to have hideouts.
“The latest reports are that they have been taken across the borders, some to Cameroon and Chad,” Aliyu said. It was not possible to verify the reports about more than 200 missing girls kidnapped in the northeast by the Boko Haram terrorist network two weeks ago.
“Some of them have been married off to insurgents. A medieval kind of slavery. You go and capture women and then sell them off,” community elder Pogu Bitrus of Chibok, the town where the girls were abducted, told the BBC Hausa Service.
Protests
Outrage over the failure to rescue the girls is growing and hundreds of women braved heavy rain to march today to Nigeria’s National Assembly to protest lack of action over the students. Hundreds more also marched in Kano, Nigeria’s second city in the north.
“The leaders of both houses said they will do all in their power but we are saying two weeks already have past, we want action now,” said activist Mercy Asu Abang.
We want our girls to come home alive — not in body bags.
Nigerians have harnessed social media to protest, trending under the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls.
A federal senator from the region said the military is aware of the movements of the kidnappers and the girls because he has been feeding them details that he has gathered on a near-daily basis.
“Whatever it takes”
Zanna said some of the girls are in Kolofata in Cameroon, about 15 kilometres from the border with Nigeria. He said one of the insurgents had called a friend in Borno state to say that he had just got married and was settling in Kolofata. Zanna also said three or four days ago Nigerian herdsmen reported seeing the girls taken in boats onto an island in Lake Chad.
Another senator from the region said the government needs to get international help to rescue the girls. The government must do “whatever it takes, even seeking external support to make sure these girls are released,” Senator Ali Ndume said.
The longer it takes the dimmer the chances of finding them, the longer it takes the more traumatised the family and the abducted girls are.
About 50 of the kidnapped girls managed to escape from their captors in the first days after their abduction, but some 220 remain missing, according to the principal of the Chibok Girls Secondary School, Asabe Kwambura. They are between 16 and 18 years old and had been recalled to the school to write a physics exam.
Criticism
The failure to rescue the girls is a massive embarrassment to Nigeria’s government and the military, already confronted by mounting criticism over its apparent inability to curb the 5-year-old Islamic uprising despite having draconian powers through an 11-month state of emergency in three northeastern states covering one-sixth of the country.
The military trumpets a success in its “onslaught on terrorists” but then the extremists step up the tempo and deadliness of their attacks. More than 1,500 people have been killed in the insurgency so far this year, compared to an estimated 3,600 between 2010 and 2013.
President Goodluck Jonathan, who is from the predominantly Christian south of Nigeria, has been accused of insensitivity to the plight of people in the north, who are mainly Muslims.
The military’s lack of progress in rescuing the girls indicates that large parts of northeastern Nigeria remain beyond the control of the government. Until the kidnappings, the air force had been mounting near-daily bombing raids since mid-January on the Sambisa Forest and mountain caves bordering Chad.
Aliyu said that in northeastern Nigeria “life has become nasty, short and brutish. We are living in a state of anarchy.”
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Looks like lots are not as sick as they think
Less work – Less accidents
Less traffic – Less accidents
Less leaving the house – Less accidents.
No pubs open – Less drunken behaviour that leads to assaults/accidents.
It has very little to do with people not being as sick as they though they were but more to do with the restriction of movement and interactions with others.
Hopefully this will take pressure off the secondary appointments that would have been needed had the number of visits stayed high.
@Jurga Moylan: every cloud and all that…..
@Jurga Moylan: wring, they were brainwashed into thinking that they could pick up de virus.
@Tom Fitzgibbons: you sound a bit brainwashed yourself if that’s your thinking.
@HuffnPuff: can you explain how someone thinking for themselves can be brainwashed?
@Jurga Moylan: Less doctors sending people to A&E too, my daughter was sent in twice and they couldn’t understand why the doctor had arranged it
People were frightened into not attending. How many people have died or suffered life changing events because of the initial pleas to stay away? We later had a change of tack with people being regularly reminded not to leave it too late.For some it was.
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/stroke-victims-too-late-coming-to-hospital-because-of-coronavirus-fears-says-medic-1.4216708
https://www.rte.ie/news/health/2020/0418/1132357-heart-health/
@Kerry Wynne: we have also had a reduction in the number of suicide related deaths. There are many sides to this story.
Not as big a drop as I had thought. The way people were reporting hospitals as empty I was imagining a 75% drop, not 25%. I had heard from an ED nurse that Friday and Saturday nights were far quieter and now identical to any other night, without the drink related injuries.
@NotMyIreland: 25% in comparison to same time last year but around 50% in comparison to previous months this year. Hospitals are pretty empty everywhere. In many countries hospital staff were made to work short time as they weren’t needed.
@mar: The article states March was down 16% on February so not sure where you have pulled the 50% down?
@Agenda21: What are you on about, this is an article on A&E’s and how the numbers are down. The Government and Health professionals have encouraged people to attend A&E if needed. What do you want, Government ministers calling to everyone’s house to ask them if they are ok? You make it sound as if the A&E’s have been closed.
@Agenda21: Tarred and feathered people will just have to go to A&E and make a mess of the waiting room. Think of the other patients!
90% only there cos have medical cards same heads everyday get them to pay e50 every time all hospitals be like Lourdes
have your say