Nigerians report 91 more abducted

In this file photo taken on Tuesday, May 27, 2014, Women attend a prayer meeting calling on the government to rescue the kidnapped girls of the government secondary school in Chibok, in Abuja, Nigeria. Extremists have abducted 91 more people, including toddlers as young as 3, in weekend attacks on villages in Nigeria, witnesses said Tuesday, June 24, 2014, providing fresh evidence of the military's failure to curb an Islamic uprising and the governments inability to provide security. The victims included 60 girls and women, some of whom were married, and 31 boys, witnesses said. A local official confirmed the abductions, but security forces denied them. Nigeria's government and military have been internationally embarrassed by their slow response to the abductions of more than 200 schoolgirls who were kidnapped April 15 and remain captive.
In this file photo taken on Tuesday, May 27, 2014, Women attend a prayer meeting calling on the government to rescue the kidnapped girls of the government secondary school in Chibok, in Abuja, Nigeria. Extremists have abducted 91 more people, including toddlers as young as 3, in weekend attacks on villages in Nigeria, witnesses said Tuesday, June 24, 2014, providing fresh evidence of the military's failure to curb an Islamic uprising and the governments inability to provide security. The victims included 60 girls and women, some of whom were married, and 31 boys, witnesses said. A local official confirmed the abductions, but security forces denied them. Nigeria's government and military have been internationally embarrassed by their slow response to the abductions of more than 200 schoolgirls who were kidnapped April 15 and remain captive.

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria -- Extremists have abducted 91 more people, including toddlers as young as 3, in weekend attacks on villages in Nigeria, witnesses said Tuesday.

The latest kidnappings happened less than three months after members of the Boko Haram extremist group took more than 200 schoolgirls in a mass abduction. Those girls are still being held captive.

The most recent victims included 60 girls and women, some of whom were married, and 31 boys, witnesses said.

A local official confirmed the abductions, but security forces denied them.

There was no way to safely and independently confirm the report from Kummabza, 95 miles from Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state, where a military state of emergency has failed to curtail near-daily attacks by Boko Haram fighters.

Vigilante leader Aji Khalil said Tuesday that the abductions happened Saturday in an attack that killed four villagers. Khalil lives in Maiduguri but gets reports daily from vigilante groups elsewhere in Nigeria that have had some success in repelling Boko Haram with primitive weapons.

A senior councilor from the village's Damboa local government said abductions had occurred. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to give information to reporters.

The councilor said the reports came from elderly survivors of the attack who had walked some 15 miles to the relative safety of other villages.

An intelligence officer with Nigeria's Department of State Security also said there had been a mass abduction, but he said it occurred in Kummabza and three nearby villages between June 13 and 15, and that no one knows the actual number abducted. He also spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to reporters.

There was no way to reconcile the differing accounts.

There also was confusion surrounding the kidnappings in April. Several prominent Nigerians questioned whether those abductions had taken place, including first lady Patience Jonathan, who claimed the reports were fabricated to discredit her husband's administration.

Last week, a presidential committee investigating the April kidnappings stressed that they did happen and clarified the number of students kidnapped. It said there were 395 students at the school -- 119 who escaped during the siege of the school and another 57 who escaped in the first couple of days after the abduction, leaving 219 unaccounted for.

U.S. Rep. Chris Smith met earlier this month with one of the girls who escaped.

"Almost two months later, clearly she was still traumatized -- you could hear it in her quivering voice and see it in her eyes. Yet she spoke mostly of her deep concern for her friends and classmates still in captivity and pleaded for their immediate rescue," he said in a statement issued Tuesday.

Smith, a Republican from New Jersey, also quoted testimony to the House Foreign Relations Committee last week by a former U.S. ambassador, Robin Renee Sanders, who warned that "Nigeria is in the beginning of a long war. ... There is no easy fix."

John Campbell, another former U.S. ambassador to Nigeria who is an analyst with the Council of Foreign Relations, predicted the kidnappings would continue because, for Boko Haram, the strategy has been "remarkably successful: It focuses attention on the shortcomings of the Nigerian government."

The latest abductions were the subject of speculation at a rally Tuesday in the capital of Abuja, part of an ongoing protest to keep attention on the prolonged trauma of the girls kidnapped from the village of Chibok. Various speakers worried about the fate of the new victims.

The "Bring Back Our Girls" rally is organized by women from all tribes, religions and ages -- an unusual display of unity in a country divided about equally between the mainly Muslim north and predominantly Christian south.

A strategy to rescue the girls is at an impasse. Nigeria's military has said it knows where they are but fears their abductors would kill them if military action is taken.

Boko Haram has been demanding the release of detained members, but President Goodluck Jonathan has said he will not consider a swap.

Boko Haram -- which means "Western education is sinful" -- wants to enforce Islamic law throughout the country of 170 million.

On Monday, an explosion blamed on the group killed at least eight people and wounded 12 at a medical college in the northern city of Kano, police said. It was the third bomb blast in four months in Kano, Nigeria's second-largest city.

On Saturday, Boko Haram fighters attacked four villages near Chibok, where 33 villagers, six vigilantes and about two dozen Boko Haram fighters were killed, witnesses said.

A Section on 06/25/2014

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