Kidnapped nigerian girls: Malala calls for ‘urgent action’

LAGOS: Nobel peace laureate Malala Yousafzai on Sunday called for global support to help release more than 200 Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram, as they marked 300 days as hostages. “As we mark this tragic 300th day of captivity for hundreds of kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls, I call on people everywhere to join me in demanding urgent action to free these heroic girls,” she said. Boko Haram fighters seized 276 teenagers from the Government Girls’ Secondary School in the remote town of Chibok, in Borno state, northeast Nigeria, on the evening of April 14 last year. Fifty-seven managed to escape but 219 are still being held, despite military claims that they had been located but that a rescue operation was too fraught with danger to be conducted. “If these girls were the children of politically or financially powerful parents, much more would be done to free them,” she said.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 9^th, 2015.