Nigeria will do what it can to rescue more than 200 Chibok schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram two years ago, President Muhammadu Buhari said on Thursday as he met the first girl who had managed to flee the jihadists.
Soldiers working with a vigilante group found Amina Ali Darsha Nkeki on Tuesday near Damboa, south of Maiduguri in the remote north where Boko Haram has waged a seven-year insurgency to set up an Islamic state.
Officials confirmed she was one of 219 girls abducted from the Government Secondary School in Chibok in April 2014.
“Amina’s rescue gives us new hope and offers a unique opportunity to vital information,” Buhari said during a meeting with the teenager, her mother and officials after a presidential jet had flown her to Abuja.
He said the government would make it a priority that Amina, who showed Buhari her four-month old baby, can go back to school.
“Nobody in Nigeria should be put through the brutality of forced marriage, every girl has a right to education and their choice of life,” he said. “Amina must be able go back to school.”
After Amina was discovered the army said it had detained a suspected Boko Haram militant called Mohammed Hayatu, who said he was her husband.
On Thursday the military released pictures of a clean-shaven man in a white shirt and cream slacks sitting beside Amina on a hospital bed holding the infant in his lap.
The governor of Borno State where the town of Chibok is located said army generals were already drawing up plans to rescue her classmates.
“We believe that in the coming weeks we shall recover the rest of the girls,” Governor Kashim Shettima told reporters after the meeting in Buhari’s office. “The military is already moving into the forest.”
Amina, who was accompanied by her mother, Binta, and security chiefs spent more than an hour with Buhari, who made crushing Boko Haram a pillar of his 2015 presidential election campaign.
Binta paid tribute to her daughter’s rescuers, in her first public comments on her daughter’s return.
“She expressed her appreciation to the government for rescuing her daughter. She never thought she would ever see her daughter” again, according to a statement read to the media.
Amina, who was 17 when she was kidnapped, was the youngest of 13 children, 11 of whom died when they reached the ages of four and five, according to the statement.
“Having seen Amina grow up and get to the age she was and Amina being snatched away from her, she (Binta) was heartbroken and devastated,” it added.
“But today Amina is back to her and she is thankful to God and thankful to everyone that participated in the rescue and recovery of her daughter.”
Binta’s husband, Ali, died soon after the abduction, according to Chibok community leaders.
