Five parents of
the abducted 219 Chibok schoolgirls have
received calls from the phone numbers of
their missing daughters, our correspondent gathered on Tuesday.
The parents who reportedly called back the lines were however told off by the respondents at the other end.
The Chairman, Chibok
Community in Abuja,
Tsambido Abana, told our correspondent that the community planned to report the incident to the government for investigation.
“Five parents informed me that they have been receiving calls from their daughters’
phones, but when they
called back, the persons that responded said the phones were their own
and that they should stop calling the lines.
We don’t know if the network (telecom firms) had allocated
the girls’ lines
to other persons or if
the callers were just
playing pranks on the parents; we will report
this to the government
for security agencies to
investigate,” Abana said.
The Chibok elder could not however confirm when the parents
received the calls, saying he was just
informed about it on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, a 16-year-old girl identified as
Fati, who regained
freedom after spending two years in Boko
Haram’s captivity, has
explained how teenage girls volunteer to go
on suicide missions in
order to escape molestation and other
forms of hardship under the sect.
Fati, whose name was
changed to protect her
identity, said young girls
fight to strap on a bomb, not because they were brainwashed
by their captors but
because the relentless
hunger and segxwal abuse became too
much to bear.
“They came to us to pick us. They would
ask, ‘Who wants to be a suicide
bomber?’
The girls would shout, ‘me, me, me.’ They
were fighting to do the
suicide bombings,” Fati
told CNN.
“It was just because they want to run away from Boko Haram. If
they give them a suicide bomb, then maybe they would
meet soldiers, tell them, ‘I have a bomb
on me’ and they could
remove the bomb. They
can run away.”
The teenager who was
kidnapped from her village by the insurgents shared her
experience with CNN at a refugee camp
in Cameroon.
“We said, ‘No, we are too small; we don’t
want to get married, so
they married us by force,” Fati said,
explaining that after he raped her for the
first time, her abuser gave her a wedding
present – a purple and
brown dress with a
matching headscarf that she would wear for the next two
years.
While under his control, she explained that
she was whisked from
one hideouts to another
hideouts in order to evade security forces.
She recalled that she met girls even younger than her in Sambisa Forest, some of whom she claimed were the abducted Chibok
schoolgirls.
“There were so many
kidnapped girls there, I
couldn’t count.
There were always bombs and bullets
coming from the sky. All of the girls were
so frightened.
All of them, they always cried and the
men raped us.
There is no food, nothing. The children,
you can count their ribs
because of the hunger,” said Fati, who is
now in Minawao
refugee camp in Cameroon.
Fati said, “Many girls are still in Sambisa, some
volunteering to die so that they can perhaps live.”
The United Nations
International Children
Emergency Fund has said Boko Haram’s use of child bombers has
increased over the last year with one in five
suicide attacks now done by children.
In a report titled, Beyond Chibok, UNICEF
said that boys abducted and recruited into Boko Haram’s ranks were forced to
attack their own families to demonstrate their loyalty, while girls were
exposed to severe abuse including segxwal
violence and forced
marriage to fighters.
The UN report was released as Nigeria
approaches the second
anniversary of the kidnapping by Boko Haram of more than
200 girls from their boarding school in
Chibok.
“Girls, who are often drugged, were behind
three-quarters of such
attacks committed by
the militant Islamist group in Cameroon,
Nigeria and Chad.
“It is an 11-fold increase with four attacks in 2014 compared to 44 the next year, including
January 2016,” the report said, adding that the change in tactics
reflected the loss of
territory by the
terrorist group.
UNICEF said up to 1.3 million children have
been forced from their
homes across Cameroon, Chad, Nigeria
and Niger.
A 17-year-old girl who was abducted and is
living with her baby in a camp Maiduguri told
the UN agency that she
refused to marry despite death threats.
“Then they came for me at night. They
kept me locked in a house for over a month
and told me:
‘Whether you like it or not, we have already married you,” she
narrated.
SOURCE:
https://uzopedia.wordpress.com/2016/04/13/five-chibok-parents-received-calls-from-missing-girls-mobiles/
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