Nigerian gunmen abduct 8 more girls

Suspected Boko Haram gunmen kidnapped eight girls from a village near one of their strongholds in northeastern Nigeria overnight, police and residents said yesterday.

The abduction of the girls, aged 12 to 15, follows the kidnapping of more than 200 other schoolgirls by the Islamist militant group last month.

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.

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 violence around the northeast.

Boko Haram, the main security threat to Africa’s leading energy producer, is growing bolder and appears better armed than ever. 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, all events that have embarrassed the government before a World Economic Forum meeting on Africa in Abuja from May 7-9.

The military’s inability to find the girls in three weeks, has led to protests in the northeast, Abuja and Lagos, the commercial capital.

Warning that “time is of the essence,” the United States announced yesterday that it would assemble a special team in Nigeria to help that country’s government rescue more than 200 kidnapped schoolgirls before they are sold into slavery or killed.

Secretary of State John Kerry announced that he had telephoned Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan to urge him to accept American assistance nearly one month after the girls were abducted.