Nigeria’s government claims to have reached a deal with Islamic militant group Boko Haram for a cease-fire, but there were conflicting reports as to the fate of 200 school girls kidnapped six months from a school in the northeast town of Chibok, reports FRANCE 24.
“I wish to inform this audience that a ceasefire agreement has been concluded,” Marshal Alex Badeh said in a statement after three days of talks with the militant group that has wreaked havoc in the northeast of Africa’s biggest oil producer.
While a presidency source maintained that the agreement stretched to the abducted schoolgirls, but Defence Ministry spokesman Major General Chris Olukolade said on Friday that the girls’ release was still being negotiated.
The girls have remained in captivity since April, although police and a parent of some of the missing students said last month one of the girls had been released.
Boko Haram negotiators, “assured that the schoolgirls and all other people in their captivity are all alive and well,” said the government’s spokesman on the insurgency, Mike Omeri, on Friday.
President Goodluck Jonathan has been pilloried at home and abroad for his slow response to the kidnapping and for his inability to quell the violence by the Islamist militants, seen as the biggest security threat to Africa’s biggest economy.
On Friday French President François Hollande welcomed the news and said the schoolgirls’ release was imminent.
“Boko Haram have said they will free these young girls and we have information that this will happen in the coming hours or days,” Hollande said during a meeting at the OECD in Paris.
Boko Haram, whose name roughly translates as ‘Western education is sinful’, has killed thousands of people in a five-year insurgency aimed at creating an Islamic caliphate in the vast scrubland of Nigeria’s impoverished northeast.
Read more of this report from FRANCE 24.