The Federal Government is to send some members of the Chibok community in Borno State to neighbouring Cameroon to verify whether a female suicide bomber arrested on Friday is one of the abducted Chibok schoolgirls.
This information was contained in a statement issued in Abuja on Saturday by the Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity to the President, Garba Shehu.
The statement said the Minister of Women Affairs, Hajiya Aisha Alhassan, and the Nigerian High Commissioner in Cameroon had already swung into action and were receiving a lot of cooperation from the Cameroonian authorities.
The statement said: “It has been confirmed that one of two girls is claiming to be among the girls stolen from Chibok on April 14, last year, although doubts have crept into the claim following new information from Cameroon that the two girls are aged about 10 years.”
According to the statement, one of the two is also believed to be heavily drugged and therefore not in full control of her senses.
It said Nigeria’s High Commissioner to Cameroon, Ambassador Hadiza Mustapha, had confirmed that the arrested girls might be brought to the Cameroonian capital, Younde, on Monday, at which point the High Commission would seek permission to meet with them.
The statement said the Murtala Mohammed Foundation had offered to cooperate with the Federal Government in sponsoring two parents from Chibok, who had been selected to embark on the trip to Cameroon.
It said: “The two are Yakubu Nkeki, Chairman of the Parents of the Abducted Girls from Chibok association, and Yana Galang, the group’s woman leader.
“The Nigerian High Commission will receive the two and will facilitate their access to the two girls once permission to meet and verify their identity is obtained from the Cameroonian authorities,” the statement added.
Boko Haram militants raided Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok, on April 14, 2014 while the girls were taking exams and loaded 270 of them onto trucks, though around 50 escaped shortly afterwards.
Former President Goodluck Jonathan was criticised for his slow reaction to the Chibok abductions, seen by many as indicative of his response to Boko Haram, which at its strongest held large swathes of north-eastern Nigeria.
It was nearly a month before a fact-finding committee travelled to Chibok to establish whether the abduction actually happened and how many girls were missing.
President Muhammadu Buhari, who defeated Jonathan in an election last year, ordered a new investigation into the kidnappings in January.
Joint operations between Nigeria and its neighbours Niger, Chad and Cameroon succeeded in driving Boko Haram from many of its strongholds in Nigeria last year.
