Scores of girls and young women
kidnapped from a school in
Nigeria are being forced to marry their
Islamic extremist abductors, a local human rights organization reported
Wednesday. At the same
time, the Boko Haram terrorist network is negotiating over the students'
fate and is demanding an unspecified ransom for their release, a Borno
state civic leader told The Associated Press.
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 authorized
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 ($12) to marry the fighters, Halite Aliyu of the Borno-Yobe
People's Forum told The Associated Press. 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.
Outrage
over the failure to rescue the girls is growing and hundreds of women
braved heavy rain to march Wednesday 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.
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