A video made available to CNN shows that the schoolgirls kidnapped from Chibok two years ago are still alive and looking well taken care of, the American news network is reporting.
CNN said it obtained a video of some of the Chibok Girls which had been sent to negotiators by their captors as a “proof of life”.
It also said the video had been seen by negotiators and some members of the government, but has now been shown the parents.
Parents identifying their daughters in the video. CNN PHOTO
CNN reports that Rifkatu Ayuba caught sight of her long-lost, desperately missed, now 17-year-old and wiled: “My Saratu!”
She reached out to a laptop screen, “the closest she’s been to her child in two years”.
Saratu Ayuba is one of 15 girls seen in the recording, shown to some of the families for the first time at an emotional meeting this week.
Wearing a purple abaya, with a patterned brown scarf covering her hair, Saratu stares directly into the camera.
“I felt like removing her from the screen,” Ayuba told CNN, desperate to pluck Saratu from the mysterious location where she is being held and bring her home.
“If I could, I would have removed her from the screen.”
Still from the video
The video is believed to have been made last December, CNN reported, as part of negotiations between the government and Boko Haram.
It was released by someone keen to give the girls’ parents hope that some of their daughters are still alive, and to motivate the government to help release them.
The girls, their hair covered and wearing long, flowing robes, line up against a dirty yellow wall. They show no obvious signs of maltreatment.
As the camera focuses in on each of them, a man behind the camera fires off questions: “What’s your name? Was that your name at school? Where were you taken from?”
Another still
One by one, each girl calmly states her name and explains that she was taken from Chibok Government Secondary School, according to the report.
CNN reports: “As the two-minute clip comes to an end, one of the girls, Naomi Zakaria, makes a final — apparently scripted — appeal to whoever is watching, urging the Nigerian authorities to help reunite the girls with their families.”
“I am speaking on 25 December 2015, on behalf of the all the Chibok girls and we are all well,” she says, stressing the word “all”, and CNN believes her intonation seems to imply that the 15 teens seen in the video have been chosen to represent the group as a whole.
