A video made available to CNN
shows that the schoolgirls kidnapped from Chibok two years ago are still alive
and looking well taken care of, the American news network is reporting.
CNN said it obtained a video of
some of the Chibok Girls which had been sent to negotiators by their captors as
a “proof of life.''
It also said the video had been
seen by negotiators and some members of the government, but has now
been shown the parents. CNN reports that Rifkatu Ayuba
caught sight of her long-lost, desperately missed, now 17-year-old and
wiled: “My Saratu!”
She reached out to a laptop
screen, “the closest she’s been to her child in two years”.
Saratu Ayuba is one of 15 girls
seen in the recording, shown to some of the families for the first time at an
emotional meeting this week. Wearing a purple abaya, with
a patterned brown scarf covering her hair, Saratu stares directly into the
camera.
“I felt like removing her from
the screen,” Ayuba told CNN, desperate to pluck Saratu from the mysterious
location where she is being held and bring her home.
“If I could, I would have removed
her from the screen.”
The video is believed to have
been made last December, CNN reported, as part of negotiations between the
government and Boko Haram.
It was released by someone keen
to give the girls’ parents hope that some of their daughters are still alive,
and to motivate the government to help release them. The girls, their hair covered and
wearing long, flowing robes, line up against a dirty yellow wall. They show no
obvious signs of maltreatment.
As the camera focuses in on each
of them, a man behind the camera fires off questions: “What’s your name? Was
that your name at school? Where were you taken from?”
One by one, each girl calmly
states her name and explains that she was taken from Chibok Government
Secondary School, according to the report.
CNN reports: “As the two-minute
clip comes to an end, one of the girls, Naomi Zakaria, makes a final —
apparently scripted — appeal to whoever is watching, urging the Nigerian
authorities to help reunite the girls with their families.”
“I am speaking on 25 December
2015, on behalf of the all the Chibok girls and we are all well,” she says,
stressing the word “all”, and CNN believes her intonation seems to imply that
the 15 teens seen in the video have been chosen to represent the group as a
whole.
Source: Breaking Times