Suspected Boko Haram Islamists have kidnapped eight more girls from Nigeria's embattled northeast, residents today said, after the extremist group's leader claimed responsibility for abducting more than 200 schoolgirls last month.
The girls were seized by gunmen in the village of Warabe as global outrage grew three weeks after the mass kidnapping in the nearby town of Chibok, which the UN warned may be a crime against humanity.
Boko Haram chief Abubakar Shekau said the extremist Islamist group was holding the schoolgirls abducted from Chibok on April 14 as "slaves," and threatened to "sell them in the market," in a video obtained by AFP yesterday.
The parents of those taken from Chibok said Shekau's video had made an already horrifying situation even worse.
"All along, we have been imagining what could happen to our daughters in the hands of these heinous people," Lawal Zanna, the mother of one the hostages, told AFP by phone from Chibok.
"Now Shekau has confirmed our fears," he said.
The latest kidnappings also took place in Borno state, the home base of the Islamist group.
Abdullahi Sani, a resident of Warabe, said gunmen had moved "door to door, looking for girls," late Sunday.
"They forcefully took away eight girls between the ages of 12 and 15," he added, in an account confirmed by other witnesses.
He said the attackers did not kill anyone, which was "surprising", and suggested that abducting girls was the motive for the attack.
Another Warabe resident, Peter Gombo, told AFP that the military and police had not yet deployed to the area.
"We have no security here. If the gunmen decide to pick our own girls nobody can stop them."
Initially slow to emerge, global outrage has flared over the abduction of hundreds of schoolgirls when Boko Haram stormed their school and loaded them onto trucks.
Several managed to escape but over 220 girls are still being held, according to police.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague today called the kidnappings "disgusting" while US senators urged Washington to intervene.
"We cannot close our eyes to the clear evidence of barbarity unfolding before us in Nigeria," said Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar, her voice breaking as she addressed the Senate yesterday.
And the United Nations warned that the sale of the girls could be a crime against humanity.
