BACKGROUND OF CHIBOK ABDUCTION ESCAPES 

BY EMMANUEL OGEBE

There are several databases on the abducted Chibok schoolgirls. These include:

1. Original database by Christian Association of Nigeria in Borno State
2. Database by Ex-UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown and ThisDay Newspaper
3. Database by Bring Back Our Girls Nigeria
4. Database by US Nigeria Law Group’s Justice for Jos Project USA
5. Database by Murtala Mohammed Foundation Nigeria

At USNLG we compiled our Chibok database incidentally beginning with our first meeting with an escaped School girl at the same time of our meeting with Parent Ali Maiyanga. At the time we discovered she had not been interviewed by any security forces, media or anyone besides her pastor weeks after the incident.

• One of our first uses of the database was to review a report that a girl carrying ammunition for Boko Haram during an attack in Chibok seven months after the abduction.

The girl communicated with a villager in the local Kibaku language and gave her a message for her mom named “Binta.”

After verifying that there was indeed a widowed Chibok parent named Binta, the message was ultimately relayed to her about the captive who identified herself as her daughter.

One year and six months later, that captive schoolgirl escaped with her baby and returned to her mum. On the day of her escape, our database identified her accurately as Amina Ali who had sneaked a message to her mum during the November 2014 attack on Chibok. (The details of this remarkable incident are available in the book The Chibok Girls: The Boko Haram Kidnappings and Islamist Militancy in Nigeria (Paperback)

By Helon Habila associate professor of creative writing at George Mason University, USA).

Amina Ali debriefed with her family and community before being whisked away by the Nigerian Government, held incommunicado, ordered not to disclose the deaths of some classmates and forced into Islamic prayers although she was a Christian.

• The database was also utilized to evaluate a report of an alleged Chibok schoolgirl intercepted with a Suicide Bomb in Cameroun. While Nigeria was trying to send parents to Cameroun, our findings determined that the claim was not feasible being that the age of the girl was much younger than the youngest Chibok schoolgirl abducted.
• The database was also used to rule out social media reports that the head recovered from a female suicide bomber belonged to a particular Chibok schoolgirl. While we determined that this wasn’t the girl purported to be, a focus group of Chibok girls inconclusively identified the head as a different classmate. (That finding is available in our congressional testimony in the US Congress.)

COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF ESCAPES

• In 2014, a young man whom we support named Tony miraculously escaped from Boko Haram captivity after 10 months.

When he called a relative from the military barracks where he was debriefing, the relative rejected the call as a prank since he believed Tony to be dead. Ultimately they realized he was really alive after all.

However his mum had become a refugee in Cameroun during his time in captivity. Tony finally reunited with his mum in 2020, when she made her way back to Nigeria, for the first time in six years. Dunamis church paid her rent so she could remain in Nigeria instead of Cameroun.

• The most remarkable escapee is “Rebecca”, arguably the world’s longest sex slave, who escaped after over 22 years captivity in the forests of northern Nigeria. Sola recently commemorated one year of her reunion with her daughter who is now married and has children of her own. She left behind a grown son and daughter with the islamist bandits. (Her amazing story is found here http://www.theoasisreporters.com/northern-nigerias-endemic-problem-of-abduction-of-christian-females-and-sex-slavery-rebeccas-amazing-escape-story/?fbclid=IwAR3twM44t6uv2T3-5NtGukqWpoLHsQLqIK2pCW9XgDAovrbt3kUUWmD9yOI)

There is therefore hope for these young Chibok women still.

• Our intel is that in 2014, several of them ran away but were unfortunately recaptured by the terrorists who flogged them for trying to escape.
• It was also reported that Leah and two of her schoolmates who were abducted from school in Dapchi in 2018 similarly escaped from the terror camp. Unfortunately they ran into Fulani Herdsmen who returned them to the terrorists after three days. Her two Muslim classmates were ultimately released with the others but Leah remains a captive to date – three years this month – for refusing to renounce her Christian faith.

The mystery surrounding the phone call of Halima Maiyanga last week deepens with the failure of any Nigerian authority to confirm it.

Usually by now, a presidential circus replete with briskly tailored outfits would have been on national TV.

• It is to be noted however that numerous times, one arm of government doesn’t know what the other is doing. Indeed during my detention by Gen. Abacha’s goons, the SSS did not know which agency was holding me as I was taken by the military and held in the presidential villa. This is why the US helped Nigeria establish a Terror Fusion Center in the aftermath of the Chibok abductions for aggregation of intelligence.

Given that security infrastructure, it shouldn’t take this long to ascertain the whereabouts of the purported escaped girl who called.

• In addition, phone numbers were biometrically linked to owners long ago so again the government has capacity to resolve this matter.

From our database, we note that there have been phone calls between parents and abducted schoolgirls in both the Dapchi and Chibok incidents. Here is an excerpt from published accounts by former BBC Nigeria correspondent Stephanie Hegarty:

“She was in the back of a truck, packed in with her schoolmates as men with guns tried to take them away. Her father, Daniel, told her to jump out of the van – but then the line crackled and the signal dropped.

He ran out of the house to try to find phone signal. When he called back, a man answered: “Stop calling, your daughter has been taken away”. Daniel realised then that her fate was “in the hands of God”. The next day he tried to call again but the line was dead…

Daniel, who lives in the nearby town of Mbalala, sent his daughter off to school on 14 April 2014 to sit the first of her final exams.

But late that night, in one of the most organised attacks of its insurgency, Boko Haram stormed the school compound and kidnapped Jumai, along with 275 of her classmates.

His daughter never managed to jump off the truck, like some girls who managed to escape. But Daniel has not yet given up hope that he will get her back. The two were very close.

“I understood her the best,” he says. “She worked harder than any of her three brothers and she rode a motorcycle like a man.”

A few months ago, Daniel decided to try his daughter’s phone number again. A man’s voice answered:

“This phone belongs to my wife, what do you want?”

“Who are you?” Daniel replied.

The man said: “Who are you?” Daniel ended the call.

A few days later he called the number again. Again the man answered.

“Why are you calling this number?” he asked.

Daniel lied: “I am calling you because I knew you from Maiduguri” – the largest city in Borno state.

“If you did know me you would not dial this number,” the man replied.

He called himself Amir Abdullahi – addressing himself as a militant leader. After that, Daniel didn’t call again.”

In the case of Ali Maiyanga whose daughter is the subject of last week’s mystery phone call, his daughter had called her mom on the night of the abduction but Ali wasn’t informed till the following day, our database shows.

Our database shows that Ali Maiyanga was not the only one who lost two daughters to abduction. There was another sibling duo, incidentally similarly named – Maryam and Hansatu Abubakar. Our database does not show them as recovered.

Our database also does not show whether Maryam Abubakar or Maryam Ali Maiyanga was the one taken advantage of by a terrorist convicted in Feb 2018 for their abduction.

Our records state,

“The convict Yahaya admits that a schoolgirl named Maryam asked him for help escaping during the abduction but he declined claiming he himself was a conscript.

However escaped Chibok girls informed us that several of the truck drivers who drove the girls were themselves captives but intentionally drove slowly thus enabling some to escape.

Yahaya therefore had opportunity to do the same but failed.

2. Convict Yahaya says he thought of escaping with the schoolgirl Maryam but didn’t. Again there is evidence that the first escaped girl after 2 years captivity Amina Ali did so with the help of her forced husband, himself also a conscript.

Accordingly, once again Yahaya had the opportunity to do likewise but failed…

4. Convict Yahaya claims he had a “love affair” with the captive schoolgirl Maryam.”

We recommended then and request again now that a DNA test be conducted on Maryam Ali’s baby and convicted terrorist Yahaya. And further that he provide authorities with the whereabouts of the missing Chibok girls.

…Emmanuel Ogebe Esq. is of US-Nigeria Law Group