 |
These four girls were among those who managed to escape after being abducted by the gunmen |
Today marks the 17day since our girls got abducted. Our prayer has been for them to be released in safety; Now the question is how many girls were abducted? How many escaped? and how many are we searching for?
Well, at a joint press briefing which held in Maiduguri last night, the Borno State Police Command and the Department of State
Service, DSS, office in the state released new figures of
the missing schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram insurgents, saying 276
students and not 234 were initially taken away.
The state Police Commissioner, Lawal Tanko and the Director of DSS, Ahmed Abdullahi disclosed this report which contradicts the earlier claims by parents of the affected girls, who
said 234 of their daughters were kidnapped when the insurgents attacked
the school. The CP added that 530 students from Chibok and other neighbouring towns
sat for the final examinations, and that 276 were abducted, while 53
others escaped.
Happily, the former British Prime Minister, Mr. Gordon Brown, has called for
international military assistance, such as air support, to be offered to
the Nigerian government in the hunt for the abducted girls.
It was gathered that four different battalions comprising of all formations of the Army, including those from Signals Corps, Armoured
Corps, Ordinance Corps, Intelligence Corps, Infantry Corps, Artillery
Corps, Military Police Corps and the Medical Corps have been mobilised to storm Sambisa forest and have been positioned around all the access routes into the notorious forest (North, South, East and West of the forest) so that when the troops move in from all the angles, there will be no escape route for the terrorists.