Kidnapped Nigerian Girls Recount Escape
TEHRAN (Tasnim) - Some of the girls who managed to escape after being abducted last month from a school in northeastern Nigeria by the group Boko Haram gave harrowing accounts of their ordeal.
Standing alongside their parents, the students described how the gunmen commanded the hundreds of students at the Chibok Government Girls Secondary School to gather outside, before going into a storeroom and taking all the food.
"They then moved all of us to the main gate and brought their cars where they loaded the food they had taken and asked us to get in," one of the girls recalled.
"The girls that had no shoes on and were not wearing veils were told to go and fetch them as they started to set the school on fire."
More than 300 girls were abducted on April 15 from their school in Chibok in the country's remote northeast. Fifty-three escaped and 276 remain captive, Al Jazeera reported.
The escaped girls spoke to visiting Borno state officials on May 5. In the video, which was handed out by the Borno State governor's office, the women gathered at the school cried, as the students spoke of their ordeal.
Another girl recounted how she and her friend decided to run for their lives.
"I told my friend that it is better to be killed than to be taken to a place that we did not know," she said.
Parents of the girls still in captivity, pleaded for their rescue.
"Now we don't know if our children are eating, if they are sleeping on the floor, we do not know," said one distraught mother.
The government's inability to rescue the girls nearly a month after they were abducted by Boko Haram has sparked worldwide outrage, protests and a social media campaign.
