She had been forced into marriage twice during her captivity. A UNICEF nurse kidnapped six years ago by jihadists in northeastern Nigeria has found freedom after escaping, the Nigerian army announced Friday.
Alice Loksha was kidnapped by the jihadist group Islamic State in West Africa (ISWAP) along with two Nigerian midwives working for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on March 1, 2018 during an attack targeting the town of Rann. Three other aid workers and eight Nigerian soldiers were killed. The two ICRC employees, Hauwa Liman and Saifura Khorsa, were executed after a few months of detention.
Forced to marry two bosses
“She was forced to marry a terrorist leader named Abu Umar with whom she had a son,” General Kenneth Chigbu explained Friday during a press briefing in the city of Maiduguri. After Abu Umar's death in 2022, Alice Loksha was forced to marry another ISWAP commander.
She managed to escape on October 24 and join army soldiers five days later, General Chigbu said. A source within the United Nations in the region told AFP they were trying to resolve “complications” around Loksha who was already married and had two children before her abduction.
Fear of opprobrium
“We have a tricky situation on our hands because her husband remarried after she was kidnapped, thinking she was already dead, and now here she is with another man's child,” the source said, adding that she worried about the opprobrium that Loksha and her son would suffer if she “ultimately returned to her family who could hardly welcome the child into their midst.”
Mass kidnappings, particularly of young girls, began with the rise of Boko Haram in Nigeria around fifteen years ago. In 2014, the jihadist group kidnapped 276 students in Chibok, in Borno State (north-eastern Nigeria), provoking indignation and an international mobilization called “Bring back our girls”. Around a hundred of them are still missing.
A growing number of kidnappings
Boko Haram, ISWAP and heavily armed criminal gangs, known locally as bandits, still regularly kidnap people in northeastern Nigeria but also in northwestern and central states.
According to experts, the economic crisis currently facing the continent's most populous country – the worst in thirty years – has boosted the number of kidnappings. In January, Nigerian consulting firm SBM said it had recorded 4,777 cases since President Bola Ahmed Tinubu came to power in May 2023. But figures on the subject remain unreliable, with not all cases being reported.
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