BEVERLY HILLS, March 08, (THEWILL) – School staff, locals and some students of Government Girls Secondary School, Dapchi town in Bursari local government area of Yobe state have recalled the events that led to the abduction of 110 girls by Boko Haram Insurgents following the insurgents’ attack on the village on Monday night, February 19, 2018.
Usman Mohammed, a school security guard, recalled that students were preparing to break the fast observed every Monday at the girls’ boarding school adding that it was time for his evening prayers.
“The food had just been served when we started hearing gunshots,” he said. He rushed to see what was happening. Girls were running in all directions. He could see strange men in army uniforms, carrying weapons. There were vehicles painted in military colours, with machine guns mounted on their roofs. But if you looked closer, you saw that “Allah is great” had been inscribed in Arabic on their bonnets.
“We immediately knew that these weren’t soldiers,” Mohammed told The Guardian.
“They surrounded the school and were shooting, even on the main road they were shooting.”
He recalled that the strangers were trying to round up the girls and remembered them shouting: “Stop, stop! We are not Boko Haram! We are soldiers, get into our vehicles. We will save you.
“There was not a single soldier around, none,” said Mohammed, the school security guard. “I don’t know where the soldiers went.”
A local, Mohammadu Mdada, sitting outside the market, recalled seeing two cars pull up at about 6pm.
He said men with rifles got out and asked some startled tricycle taxi drivers the locations of soldiers, the hospital and the school. Duly directed, nine more cars sped after the men, fanning out towards the three targets followed by motorcycles which have been banned across the region, and that was how Mdada knew it was Boko Haram.
At the Government Girls Science and Technical College, Hafsat Abdullahi, 18, had just got out of the bath after fasting all day. She hadn’t even taken a sip of water when she heard the shots ring out.
Hafsat and her friends assumed the sound was the school’s dodgy electricity transformer, but changed their minds when they saw military men.
“They said: ‘Come, let us help you, we are soldiers.’ We thought they really were. A lot of the students just jumped into their trucks.”
Hafsat didn’t see her, but one of those girls was Fatima, her little sister. Another student who believed the men was Habiba Jekana, who suffers from sickle cell and had been off school with a fever. Unable to walk, a friend lifted Habiba on to her back, carried her over to the truck, and hoisted both of them in.
However, a lone dormitory porter realised what was happening and cautioned the girls.
“He was shouting to all of us: ‘Don’t get into those vehicles!’ But the girls just kept jumping in,” Hafsat said.
“Then the porter turned round and drove some of us towards the fence. We jumped over it and headed into the bush.”
Hafsat and three of her schoolmates bent down and sprinted away from the school, with bullets flying around their ears. “Allah helped us. None of the bullets hit any of us,” she said. Hundreds of girls hid out in the open that night.
With 110 girls loaded into their trucks, Boko Haram drove out through the school gates.
They went back past the vigilantes, who could do nothing, having only one musket between them. “The girls were shouting and crying, ‘Please help us! Save us’,” Mdada said. “The Boko Haram men had whips in their hands, flogging the girls. They said: ‘Keep quiet, you stupid things.’”
While Habiba was being lifted into the kidnappers’ truck, her father was roasting meat at his butcher’s shop when people started sprinting past, followed by strange cars. He heard gunfire coming from the school and worried about his daughter Habiba, headed in that direction. But before he could get there, Jakana met the convoy loaded with captives.
“I knew it was them and that this was trouble,” Mainama Jakana said.
“I followed one of the trucks carrying them. I could hear the girls crying in the back of the truck, so I called out to the men.
“I pleaded with them to let my daughter go. I said she was not feeling well and she was a cripple. They told me to go back home. I kept on chasing the truck until it turned into the dusty road into the forest.”
It was reported that there had been warnings as the vigilantes got a call four hour earlier from their friends in Guma, a village 35km away, to say that people dressed in military fatigues were heading their way. Then they got a call from another nearby village, Turma.
Sadly, they were too scared of the police to report it. “We were afraid that if, in fact, they didn’t come to Dapchi, or they turned out not to be Boko Haram, then we might be in trouble,” said Mdada. “You know the Nigerian police.”
According to other villagers, the district police officer left town suddenly that morning without telling his men; something they saw as highly suspicious. The military, meanwhile, was conspicuous by its absence at the school.
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