Remi Tinubu Claims Some Abducted Chibok Girls Declined Rescue Efforts After Falling in Love
Nigeria’s First Lady, Remi Tinubu, has claimed that some of the schoolgirls abducted from Chibok in 2014 declined rescue efforts after developing feelings for the insurgents who held them captive.
During a recent trip to the United States, Mrs Tinubu was quoted by The Free Press as saying that attempts to bring back the remaining girls became more complicated after authorities discovered that several of them were unwilling to return.
“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.”
According to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, 91 of the 276 students abducted from Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok, Borno State, are still unaccounted for.
Mrs Tinubu, who attended the National Prayer Breakfast in the U.S., said she used the visit to address what she described as “recent hype on social media that there is Christian genocide.”
The mass abduction took place in April 2014 when Boko Haram fighters stormed the boarding school, taking 276 girls in an attack that drew global outrage. Since then, about 189 of the students have regained freedom through military rescue operations or by escaping captivity.
When contacted for confirmation of the First Lady’s remarks, the Nigerian Army said it could not immediately verify the claim. The Army spokesperson, Onyechi Anele, said, “How do I confirm this now?” and promised to check, but did not respond to subsequent calls.
Last year, the National Coordinator of the National Counter Terrorism Centre under the Office of the National Security Adviser, Major-General Adamu Laka, reiterated that the government had not abandoned efforts to secure the remaining captives.
“We have not given up hope on them; some of them were married to some of the insurgents. Some have come out. But let our focus not only on the Chibok girls because there are others that have been kidnapped,” he said while briefing journalists.
More than a decade after the attack, the fate of dozens of the Chibok girls remains unresolved, as authorities continue efforts to locate and free them.
