In an audio recording revealed on 27 August, kidnapped Christian schoolgirl Leah Sharibu appealed to the government of Nigeria to win her release from Islamic extremist group Boko Haram.
Boko Haram released more than 100 schoolgirls about four weeks after kidnapping them in February, but held Leah, 15, because she refused to convert to Islam.
In the audio recording obtained by a journalist for Nigerian online news outlet The Cable, Leah said in her native Hausa that she wants the government and ‘people of goodwill’ to rescue her.
Desperate plea for help
‘I am begging you to treat me with compassion, I am calling on the government, particularly the President, to pity me and get me out of this serious situation,’ she said on the recording. CNN today reported that her father, Sharibu Nathan, confirmed that the voice is that of his daughter.
Boko Haram, which seeks to impose Islamic law (shari’a) throughout Nigeria, kidnapped the girls from a boarding school in Dapchi, the Government Girls Science Technical College, in northeastern Nigeria’s Yobe state. President Muhammadu Buhari’s spokesman, Garba Shehu, told CNN that intelligence personnel were analysing the voice recording, and that officials would issue a statement after studying it.
Boko Haram has kidnapped more than 1,000 children in Nigeria since 2013, according to CNN. About 100 of 276 girls kidnapped by Boko Haram from the town of Chibok, in Borno state, in 2014 are still missing. Boko Haram, whose name is loosely translated as ‘Western education is a sin’, has fought for nine years to impose Islamic law on all of Nigeria, killing tens of thousands of people and displacing more than 2 million. Boko Haram militants reportedly warned parents of the returned Dapchi girls not to send their daughters back to school.
