Cameroon:Doubts if the female suicide bombers were among those kidnapped by Boko Haram

 

Authorities in Cameroon on Monday poured doubt on a would-be suicide bomber’s claim that she is one of the 276 Nigerian school girls kidnapped by Boko Haram Islamists in 2014.
“We don’t think that she was one of the girls (kidnapped) from Chibok”, an administration official who requested anonymity told AFP, citing inconsistencies over her apparent age.

The girl in question is one of two would-be suicide bombers arrested in northern Cameroon on Friday wearing 12-kilogramme (26-pound) explosives belts.
Nigeria is planning to send a delegation, including Chibok parents, to the Cameroonian capital Yaounde to meet her.

With less than a month before the second anniversary of the brazen kidnapping which shook the world, 219 students from the northern town of Chibok remain missing and there are few signs that the Nigerian government is making progress on finding and securing their release.

Boko Haram has carried out suicide bombings often using girls as part of its armed campaign to establish an Islamic state in northern Nigeria.

Midjiyawa Bakari, governor of Cameroon’s North Region had already on Saturday voiced doubts about the claim by one of the two girls arrested that she had been part of the mass Chibok kidnapping.
“We are treating this statement with caution,” he said, adding that such would-be attackers “are often drugged and can say anything”.

Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari’s spokesman Garba Shehu on Sunday echoed those doubts saying that, according to the information coming from Cameroon, the two arrested girls were “aged about 10 years”.

The “Bring Back Our Girls” advocacy group said that the youngest of those kidnapped in 2014 was 16 years old at the time.
Boko Haram has suffered substantial setbacks in recent months in the face of a counteroffensive by national armies from the region.

At least 17,000 people have been killed since Boko Haram launched an insurgency in 2009 to carve out an Islamic state in northeast Nigeria.

More than 2.6 million people have fled their homes since the start of the violence but some of the internally displaced have returned home after troops began the fight-back last year and recaptured territory.
A regional force involving troops from Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon, Niger and Benin is to deploy to fight the Islamists.