A UNICEF nurse kidnapped six years ago by jihadists in northeastern Nigeria and twice forced to marry fighters has been freed after escaping, the army announced Friday Nigerian.
Alice Loksha was kidnapped by the jihadist group Islamic State in West Africa (ISWAP) with two Nigerian midwives working for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on March 1, 2018 in a attack targeting the town of Rann, where 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.
“She was forced to marry a terrorist leader”
“She was forced to marry a terrorist leader named Abu Umar with whom she had a son,” General Kenneth Chigbu explained during a press briefing in the city of Maiduguri late Friday. .
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. “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.”
Frequent mass kidnappings
Mass kidnappings, particularly of young girls, began with the rise of Boko Haram in Nigeria around fifteen years ago. The conflict has left 40,000 dead and two million displaced, according to the United Nations.
In 2014, the jihadist group kidnapped 276 female students in Chibok, Borno state, sparking outrage and an international mobilization called “Bring back our girls”. Around a hundred of them are still missing.
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 most populous country on the continent – the worst in thirty years – has boosted the number of kidnappings.
In January, Nigerian consultancy 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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