Nigeria’s First Lady, Remi Tinubu, has said that some of the schoolgirls abducted from Chibok, Borno State, by Boko Haram declined rescue efforts because they “fell in love with their abductors.”
Speaking during a recent visit to the United States, Mrs Tinubu, according to a report by The Free Press published on Thursday, stated that the government continued attempts to free the remaining girls among the 276 kidnapped in 2014 until it discovered that many were unwilling to return. According to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, 91 of the girls are still unaccounted for.
“Even those girls kidnapped during Chibok, they are still trying to rescue them,” Mrs Tinubu said, “until they learned recently that most of them fell in love with their abductors, so that’s quite difficult. You know, they refuse to come back.”
Mrs Tinubu, who attended the National Prayer Breakfast in the U.S. last week, explained that her trip was partly aimed at addressing what she described as “recent hype on social media that there is Christian genocide.”
Her remarks come more than a decade after the abduction of the Chibok girls.
When contacted by Peoples Gazette for confirmation, the Nigerian Army said it could not immediately verify the First Lady’s assertion. The Army spokesperson, Onyechi Anele, responded, “How do I confirm this now?” and promised to check and revert. However, she did not respond to subsequent calls an hour later.
Members of Boko Haram stormed the Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok, Borno State, in April 2014, abducting 276 students in what became Nigeria’s first large-scale school kidnapping. Since then, about 189 of the girls have regained freedom at various times, either through military rescue operations or by escaping from captivity.
Last year, the National Coordinator of the National Counter Terrorism Centre under the Office of the National Security Adviser, Major-General Adamu Laka, said the government and security agencies remained committed to securing the release of the remaining captives.
“We have not given up hope on them; some of them were married to some of the insurgents. Some have come out. But let our focus not only on the Chibok girls because there are others that have been kidnapped,” Mr Laka partly said while briefing journalists.
