Suspected Boko Haram gunmen kidnapped eight girls from a village near one of the Islamists’ strongholds in northeastern Nigeria overnight, police and residents said on Tuesday.
The abduction of the girls, aged 12 to 15, follows the kidnapping of more than 200 other schoolgirls by the militant group last month, whom it has threatened to sell into slavery.
Lazarus Musa, a resident of the village of Warabe, told Reuters that armed men had opened fire during the raid.
“They were many and all of them carried guns. They came in two vehicles painted in army colour. They started shooting in our village,” Musa said by telephone from the village in the hilly Gwoza area, Boko Haram’s main base.
A police source, who could not be named, said the girls were taken away on trucks, along with looted livestock and food.
Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau threatened in a video released to the media on Monday to sell the girls abducted from a secondary school on April 14 “on the market”.
The kidnappings by the Islamists, who say they are fighting for an Islamic state in Nigeria, have shocked a country long inured to the violence around the northeast.
They have also embarrassed the government before a World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting on Africa, the annual gathering of the wealthy and powerful, in Abuja from May 7-9.
Nigerian officials had hoped the event would highlight their country’s potential as Africa’s hottest investment destination since it became the continent’s biggest economy from a GDP recalculation in March, but the forum has been overshadowed by the crisis over the girls and mystery of where they are.
That has thrown the government’s failings on national security into the spotlight just when it sought to parade its achievements such as power privatization and macroeconomic stability to top global business people and politicians.
Boko Haram, the main security threat to Africa’s leading energy producer, is growing bolder and appears better armed than ever.
“Many people tried to run behind the mountain but when they heard gun shots, they came back,” Musa said. “The Boko Haram men were entering houses, ordering people out of their houses.”
April’s mass kidnapping occurred on the day a bomb blast, also claimed by Boko Haram, killed 75 people on the edge of Abuja, the first attack on the capital in two years. Another bomb in roughly the same place killed 19 people last week.
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