DAKAR,
Senegal — Parents of girls who disappeared after their school in
northern Nigeria was attacked by militants this week heckled state
officials on Thursday and pummeled a motorcade after being told that,
despite government reports to the contrary, their daughters had yet to
be found.
“For
three days he didn’t tell us the truth until now,” Modu Goniri, the
father of two teenage girls who are among dozens still missing, said of
the state’s governor. “That’s why we are very angry.”
Militants
from Boko Haram attacked the Government Girls Science and Technical
School in Dapchi on Monday evening, guns blazing, in an episode that
evoked painful memories of the group’s 2014 attack on a school in Chibok
that included the mass abduction of schoolgirls.
An
official count of the missing in Dapchi hasn’t been released, although
the governor’s office said it was working to compile one. Initial
accounts from the police and state officials put the number somewhere
between 50 and 100; Mr. Goniri said that 94 girls were still missing.
Amid
conflicting rumors about the episode and its aftermath, state officials
had told parents on Wednesday that the girls had been rescued. But when
Ibrahim Gaidam, the governor of Yobe State, arrived at the school on
Thursday to update frantic and worried parents, he said the girls in
fact were still missing. Boos rang out from the crowd.
“We
issued the statement on the basis of information provided by one of the
security agencies that is involved in the fight against Boko Haram and
which we had no reason to doubt,” the statement read. “We have now
established that the information we relied on to make the statement was
not credible.”
Critics
have also expressed outrage that neither government nor military
officials have offered information about whether the girls have been
taken hostage. The lack of clarity has left parents wondering whether
their daughters are in the hands of the militants or are wandering the
remote countryside.
Teachers
at the Dapchi school said many of the 900 students fled as militants
rushed the village. Some of those now accounted for hid for hours in the
surrounding bush or trekked for miles to their family farms. Some
didn’t get away in time, witnesses said.
Many
Nigerians fear the episode is similar to the 2014 abduction of nearly
300 girls in Chibok. About 50 of those students escaped in the hours
after they were taken, nearly 100 more were released after government negotiations, and a few escaped in recent months. But another 100 remain captive.
The government’s silence in the days after the Chibok attack was blamed for stalling the rescue effort.
Nigeria’s
war with Boko Haram is in its ninth year. The military has made
progress against the group but militants still attack villages and
military and food aid convoys, as well as deploy suicide bombers. Despite that, President Muhammadu Buhari has declared repeatedly to have defeated Boko Haram.
The
attack at the school in Dapchi “draws dreadful and eerie similarities
with the confusion that surrounded official communication following the
abduction of our #ChibokGirls,” said a statement from Bring Back Our
Girls, a group that advocates for the release of the Chibok students.
“How is it that a terrorist group said to have been defeated able to
abduct in the range of 100 schoolgirls?”
