A video showing 10 distraught women, believed to be the ones kidnapped in a raid by the militant group on a military/police convoy in Borno State some weeks ago, has been received by SaharaReporters.
Following the incident, which took place a few kilometres outside Maiduguri, on Damboa Road, the Nigeria police refuted claims by Boko Haram that some police officers had been killed or abducted by the terror group.
Although the two women who speak on the video, which was sent exclusively to SaharaReporters, do not introduce themselves as police personnel, one Amina Adam Gomdia, speaking in eloquent Hausa, describes five of the women in their midst as public servants who are also breadwinners in their families. Gomdia introduces herself as a lecturer at the Federal College of Fisheries, Baga.
It is not clear if the other women, who appear to be too shocked to speak, with some of them in tears, are police women or wives of police officers. But it would be recalled that the convoy they were travelling in when they were attacked was carrying the corpse of a police woman who had earlier been killed by the terrorist group.
The second woman who speaks on the video gives her name as Deborah Philipus. She says that right from the minute they were abducted, Boko Haram has taken care of them, including treating their injuries, and that they have not lacked food, water or other necessities.
“We are grateful to you,” she says, referring to Boko Haram, “but the Government of Nigeria should not say we were not abducted, indeed we were abducted,” she says.
SaharaReporters learned she lost her husband to the militant group in the early days of the conflict when he and their two sons were slaughtered before her eyes in Maiduguri by Boko Haram militants. Since then, she says on the video, she has been looking after the rest of their children as “their mother and father.”
On behalf of the 10 women, Gomdia and Philipus pleads with the federal government not to forsake them, urging them to do everything it can to rescue them as it has done with the Chibok girls.
“Today, here we are, everyone has seen us, our relatives have seen us, government, our youngsters have all seen us, this is not a lie, we have been abducted for 30 days,” says the distraught Gomdia.
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