Nigeria's government is ready to negotiate with Islamist militant group Boko Haram to secure the release of around 200 schoolgirls kidnapped in April 2014 from the northeastern town of Chibok, if credible leaders are identified, President Muhammadu Buhari said on Wednesday, according to The Globe and Mail.
"We are prepared to negotiate with them without any preconditions," Buhari told journalists in a televised interview.
A total of 276 girls were taken from a school in Chibok by Boko Haram fighters, in a kidnapping case that made global headlines. Several dozen girls managed to escape soon afterwards, but nothing has been seen or heard from around 200 of them since May 2014, according to AFP.
Despite the hundreds of captives that have been freed in recent months as Nigeria's military has driven the Islamic extremists into a northeastern forest enclave, none of them were from a school in Chibok.
Last week, Chibok leaders suggested that Buhari, who announced that Nigeria's military has "technically won the war" against Boko Haram, had "forgotten" their girls after the Nigerian leader had said in the past that the war would not be won until the Chibok girls were rescued, according to The Global News.
The president said he had no firm intelligence on where the girls were or the state of their health, adding, "That is the honest truth."
In an apparent response to the announcement of their defeat, the insurgents attacked the northeastern city of Maiduguri with rocket-propelled grenades and multiple suicide bombings that killed about 50 people, and in nearby Madagali a twin suicide bombing killed at least 30, as reported by HNGN.
