In pretty bleak news, reports have come in to say that 11 parents of the 219 Nigerian schoolgirls who are still missing after being kidnapped from their school by terrorist group Boko Haram have died since the mass abduction three months ago.
Seven fathers of the missing girls were killed earlier this month after an attack in Kautakari, a village near Chibok, which has been cut off from the rest of Nigeria by militants. They were among 51 bodies brought to the region's hospital, according to a health worker who wished to remain anonymous for fear of revenge attacks from extremists.
And, sadder still, at least four more parents have died of heart failure, high blood pressure and other illnesses that are being blamed by members of their community on the trauma and stress of the mass abduction, which spawned the international #BringBackOurGirls campaign. Community leader Pogu Bitrus said, ‘One father of two of the girls kidnapped just went into a kind of coma and kept repeating the names of his daughters, until life left him.’
If it’s any sort of consolation, the Nigerian president, Goodluck Jonathan, upheld his promise to girls’ education rights campaigner Malala Yousafzai, who visited Nigeria last week to address the issue of the missing girls, calling them her ‘sisters’. Jonathan visited the parents of the 219 girls who are still missing after Boko Haram took them into the Sambisa forest, and also some of the girls who had luckily managed to escape their captors. According to The Telegraph, he promised that he was working to see that the girls ‘are brought out alive’ and the parents responded with no emotion but some handshakes with the president.
He insists that he is doing everything he can to make sure the girls are freed, however the Defence Ministry says, despite knowing where the girls are, they fear any military campaign to retrieve them.
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Picture: Getty
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.