Following the fall of Sambisa Forest, the military high command have revealed that fleeing Boko Haram fighters may have used the kidnapped Chibok girls as human shields to prevent being fired upon by fighter jets.
The Theatre Commander of the military campaign, Operation Lafiya Dole, Maj. Gen. Lucky Irabor, on Wednesday, showed journalists aerial footage he said was filmed during attack on Sambisa Forest that showed the terrorists moving with women and children.
“The haggard fighters were just using them as a shield,” Irabor said at a news conference in Maiduguri.
Irabor added, “That is why we did not engage them from the air. We had always believed and hoped that going into the Sambisa Forest would afford us the opportunity to get the remaining Chibok girls. What we can’t tell is whether those women we can see were the Chibok girls.”
The terrorists had kidnapped more than 200 girls from the Government Secondary School, Chibok, Borno State, on April 14, 2014.
President Muhammadu Buhari said on Saturday that the terrorists’ last enclave in the forest had been captured.
Irabor said the military was pursuing those who fled, adding that 1,240 people, suspected to be militants, their relatives or sympathisers, had been arrested in the past one week.