Abuja, Nigeria - Up to
50 Chibok schoolgirls were released by Islamist Boko Haram
militants on Saturday after more than three years in captivity,
a Nigerian government spokesman said, the largest group yet to
be freed after years of tense negotiations.
The girls were among about 220 students abducted from a
secondary school in the northeastern town of Chibok in 2014,
sparking a global campaign #bringbackourgirls supported by then
U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama and list of celebrities.
About 21 Chibok were released in October in a deal brokered
by Switzerland and the International Red Cross, while a handful
of others have escaped or been rescued. But about 195 were still
missing.
"The government will soon release an official statement," a
government spokesman told the Thomson Reuters Foundation with
the exact number of girls freed remaining uncertain.
Last month President Muhammadu Buhari said in a statement
that the government was "in constant touch through negotiations,
through local intelligence to secure the release of the
remaining girls and other abducted persons unharmed".
The girls were taken from a school in Chibok in the remote
northeastern Borno state where Boko Haram has waged an
insurgency aimed at creating an Islamic state that has killed
thousands and displaced more than 2 million people.
For more than two years there was no sign of the Chibok
schoolgirls but the discovery of one of the girls with a baby in
May 2016 fuelled hopes for their safety, with a further two
girls found in later months and the group released in October.
United Nations special rapporteurs have stressed that the
Chibok girls are not the only ones who have suffered violence at
the hands of Boko Haram.
At least 2,000 boys and girls have been kidnapped by Boko
Haram since 2014, with many used as cooks, sex slaves, fighters
and even suicide bombers, according to Amnesty International.
The use of children as suicide bombers by Boko Haram is also
on the rise in the Lake Chad region with 27 such attacks
recorded in the first three months of 2017 compared to nine for
the same period in 2016, the U.N. children's agency UNICEF said.
Despite having lost most of the territory it held in 2015,
Boko Haram continues to wage its insurgency, which is now in its
eighth year.