Usman Alkali Baba, the Inspector-General of Police, has disclosed that some Chibok school girls rescued from Boko Haram abductors were eager to return to the terrorists.
Usman made the disclosure on Thursday during a weekly briefing organised by the Presidential Media Team in Abuja.
He noted that security forces are dealing with instability were sometimes obliged to go low to bargain with bandits or kidnappers in order to rescue captives unharmed.
He said, “The issue of Chibok girls; you know they are coming out one after another and gradually. Sometimes they come out and say yes, we have come to see our parents and we want to go back.
“So maybe they have been assimilated or acclimatised with the situation and indoctrinated and had become part and parcel of those who have abducted them. But like as I’m saying, it is a continuous effort and even last month, you saw a Chibok girl coming out with two or three kids and said she only came to greet her parents and she wants to go back. So, we are still on it, there is hope.”
He continued: “You see, the issue of kidnapping is an issue that borders almost all the security agents, including the military, it is a crime that once it is committed, you have to thread very softly and with all sense of professionalism.
“If you do not rescue the person, safely, unhurt, you have not achieved anything and once somebody is in the captivity of an armed person, then you need to do a lot of things, it is not all about guns and other things.
“There are a lot of other things that can be done. We were able to rescue the whole of Forestry students in Kaduna through negotiation, we were able to rescue many others, which I can give you an example, for those that we are in contact with, there are things that we are doing, it is a new crime and requires new ways of approaching it and new ways of dousing it.
“Clearly it is under study. For instance, the issue of Train negotiators and so forth were not an issue before, but now we are looking into it and we are putting our personnel to undergo such training and courses. So, we will not say hope is lost. We are still on it”.
In April 2014, 276 female students aged from 16 to 18 were kidnapped by the Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram from the Government Girls Secondary School at the town of Chibok in Borno State, Nigeria.
Prior to the raid, the school had been closed for four weeks due to deteriorating security conditions, but the girls were in attendance in order to take final exams in physics.
Meanwhile, 57 of the schoolgirls escaped immediately following the incident by jumping from the trucks on which they were being transported, and others have been rescued by the Nigerian Armed Forces on various occasions.
Hopes have been raised that the 219 remaining girls might be released; however some girls are believed to be dead. Amina Ali, one of the missing girls, was found in May 2016. She claimed that the remaining girls were still there, but that six had died. As of 14 April 2021, seven years after the initial kidnapping, over 100 of the girls remain missing.
Some have described their capture in appearances at international human rights conferences. Boko Haram has used the girls as negotiating pawns in prisoner exchanges, offering to release some girls in exchange for some of their captured commanders in jail.