Nigeria’s First Lady, Remi Tinubu, has claimed that some of the Chibok schoolgirls still held by Boko Haram have refused government rescue efforts because they “fell in love with their abductors.”
Speaking during her U.S. visit at the National Prayer Breakfast, Mrs. Tinubu said, as reported by Peoples Gazette, “Even those girls kidnapped during Chibok, they are still trying to rescue them, until they learned recently that most of them fell in love with their abductors, so that’s quite difficult. You know, they refuse to come back.”
The revelation comes nearly 12 years after the April 2014 raid on Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok, Borno State, where Boko Haram abducted 276 schoolgirls, in what was Nigeria’s first mass school kidnapping.
About 189 girls have regained freedom through rescue operations or escape, leaving 91 still in captivity, according to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women.
Mrs. Tinubu, who attended the U.S. event amid concerns about a supposed Christian genocide campaign, said her trip also aimed to address “recent hype on social media that there is Christian genocide.”
