US drones may join search for abducted girls

People holding signs take part in a protest demanding the release of abducted secondary school girls from the remote village of Chibok, in Lagos. Reuters

Pressure was growing last night for Western military drones to be used in the hunt for more than 200 schoolgirls abducted in Nigeria, as the terrorist thought to be holding them threatened to “marry off” girls aged as young as nine.

 
Independent.ie report quotes experts as saying that unmanned spy planes of the kind used in Afghanistan could be deployed along with satellite-operated cameras to search the vast areas of desert and woodland where the girls are thought to be hidden.

Over the weekend, the Nigerian military massed for a search operation in the Sambisa Forest region, although on Sunday, President Goodluck Jonathan said the government still did not know where the girls were.

According to Nigerian police, about 223 girls are still missing after being abducted from their boarding school in the remote northern Nigerian town of Chibok on April 14.

The online newsmedium further reported that the urgency of the situation was underlined Monday when Boko Haram, the Islamic extremist group believed to have abducted the girls, released a video in which its leader gloatingly threatened to sell them as “slaves”.

“I abducted your girls,” said Abubakar Shekau, who appeared dressed in combat fatigues and standing in front of an armoured personnel carrier. Six masked gunmen flanked him.

“I will sell them in the market, by Allah. I will marry off a woman at the age of 12. I will marry off a girl at the age of nine.”

Shekau described the abduction as part of Boko Haram’s war against Western-style secular education in Nigeria, which has seen the group attack dozens of schools in the predominantly Muslim north.

“I said Western education should end,” he added. “Girls, you should go and get married.”

The release of the tape comes as a major security operation gets under way in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, ahead of a World Economic Forum conference that starts on Wednesday.

Last week, a car bomb attack blamed on Boko Haram killed 19 people in the city.

With the plight of the missing schoolgirls now likely to play high on the agenda of the conference, Mr Jonathan said over the weekend that he had reached out to the US, Britain, France and China for help on security issues.

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