Thursday 14 April 2016

Chibok abduction: The Nigerian town that lost its girls

On the night that Jumai was kidnapped from the Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok, she called her dad.
She was in the back of a truck, packed in with her schoolmates as men with guns tried to take them away. Her father, Daniel, told her to jump out of the van - but then the line crackled and the signal dropped.
He ran out of the house to try to find phone signal. When he called back, a man answered: "Stop calling, your daughter has been taken away". Daniel realised then that her fate was "in the hands of God". The next day he tried to call again but the line was dead.

Although some families of the missing girls were happy for us to use their photos and names, we have changed the names of Jumai and her father to protect their identity.
Until the girls were taken, the area around Chibok had been relatively peaceful. Islamist militant group Boko Haram had attacked villages further north and east but this busy market town had escaped.
Daniel, who lives in the nearby town of Mbalala, sent his daughter off to school on 14 April 2014 to sit the first of her final exams.
But late that night, in one of the most organised attacks of its insurgency, Boko Haram stormed the school compound and kidnapped Jumai, along with 275 of her classmates.
His daughter never managed to jump off the truck, like some girls who managed to escape. But Daniel has not yet given up hope that he will get her back. The two were very close.
"I understood her the best," he says. "She worked harder than any of her three brothers and she rode a motorcycle like a man."
A few months ago, Daniel decided to try his daughter's phone number again. A man's voice answered:
"This phone belongs to my wife, what do you want?"
"Who are you?" Daniel replied.
The man said: "Who are you?" Daniel ended the call.
A few days later he called the number again. Again the man answered.
"Why are you calling this number?" he asked.
Daniel lied: "I am calling you because I knew you from Maiduguri" - the largest city in Borno state.
"If you did know me you would not dial this number," the man replied.
He called himself Amir Abdullahi - addressing himself as a militant leader. After that, Daniel didn't call again.

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