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Nigerian Islamist leader threatens to sell abducted girls 'as slaves'
Pressure was growing on Monday night for Western military drones to be used in the hunt for more than 200 schoolgirls abducted in Nigeria, as the terrorist thought to be holding them threatened to “marry off” girls aged as young as nine.
Experts said that unmanned spy planes of the kind used in Afghanistan could be deployed along with satellite-operated cameras to search the vast areas of desert and woodland where the girls are thought to be hidden.
Over the weekend, the Nigerian military massed for a search operation in the Sambisa Forest region, although on Sunday, President Goodluck Jonathan said the government still did not know where the girls were. According to Nigerian police, about 223 girls are still missing after being abducted from their boarding school in the remote northern Nigerian town of Chibok on April 14.
The urgency of the situation was underlined yesterday when Boko Haram, the Islamic extremist group believed to have abducted the girls, released a video in which its leader gloatingly threatened to sell them as “slaves”. . . .