The Islamist militant group Boko Haram claimed responsibility on Monday for the abduction of more than 200 schoolgirls during a raid in the village of Chibok in northeast Nigeria last month, the news agency Agence France-Presse reported, citing a video it had obtained.
'I abducted your girls,' Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau said in the video, according to AFP. It did not immediately give further details.
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Boko Haram on April 14 stormed an all-girl secondary school in the village of Chibok, in Borno state, then packed the teenagers, who had been taking exams, onto trucks and disappeared into a remote area along the border with Cameroon. The brazenness and sheer brutality of the school attack has shocked Nigerians, who had been growing accustomed to hearing about atrocities in an increasingly bloody five-year-old Islamist insurgency in the north. PROTEST LEADER SAYS FIRST LADY HAD HER ARRESTED
A leader of a protest march for the missing said that Nigeria's first lady ordered her and another protest leader arrested Monday, expressed doubts there was any kidnapping and accused them of belonging to the Islamic insurgent group blamed for the abductions.
Saratu Angus Ndirpaya of Chibok town said State Security Service agents drove her and protest leader Naomi Mutah Nyadar to a police station Monday after an all-night meeting at the presidential villa in Abuja, the capital. She said police immediately released her but that Nyadar remains in detention. The national police spokesman referred a journalist to the spokeswoman for police in Abuja. Reached on the phone, the spokeswoman said she was driving and could not immediately respond.
Ndirpaya says first lady Patience Jonathan accused them of fabricating the abductions. 'She told so many lies, that we just wanted the government of Nigeria to have a bad name, that we did not want to support her husband's rule,' she said in a telephone interview with Associated Press.
She said other women at the meeting cheered and chanted 'yes, yes,' when Mrs. Jonathan accused them of belonging to Boko Haram. 'They said we are Boko Haram, and that Mrs. Nyadar is a member of Boko Haram.' She said Nyadar and herself do not have daughters among those abducted, but are supporting the mothers of kidnapped daughters. PRESIDENT UNDER PRESSURE
The mass abduction and failure to rescue the girls now in a fourth week of captivity is a source of deep embarrassment to Jonathan and his government, which is accused of insensitivity to the girls' plight and not doing enough to rescue them.
In a televised 'media chat' Sunday night, Jonathan promised his administration is doing everything possible. On Friday he created a presidential committee to go to the affected Borno state to work with the community on a strategy for the release.
Asked if his government was negotiating with the abductors, Jonathan said it was impossible to negotiate with people who do not identify themselves, and noted that Boko Haram have not claimed responsibility for the mass abduction, though some girls who have escaped from them said their captors identified themselves as Boko Haram.
Police say more than 300 girls and young women were abducted April 15 from Chibok school and that 276 remain in captivity.
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