Despite the widely reported truce talks between the federal government and terror group Boko Haram, 60 women and girls have been kidnapped from two towns in north-east Nigeria, reports have said.
According to Agence France-Presse, residents of Wagga said that suspected Islamist gunmen went door-to-door looking for young women and girls, abducting 40 of them. Wagga town is not far from Chibok, where over 200 girls were on April 14 kidnapped by the terrorists.
“They left N1,500 and some kola nuts in each home where they seized a woman, apparently as a bride price,” said Lazarus Baushe, an elder of the Wagga community.
AFP quoted Enoch Mark, a priest from Chibok who had previously worked in Wagga, as saying that an estimated 40 women and girls had been taken in the recent raid.
20 female were also said to have been abducted in Gwarta, another town in Nigeria’s northeast, at the weekend.
The raids will further raise doubts on the genuineness of the ceasefire announced by the federal government last Friday, which had earlier raised hope of an end to the five-year insurgency that has claimed over 10,000 lives. The federal government said the release of the abducted Chibok girls was part of the ongoing negotiation.
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