Abducted girls Nigeria security agenda

Nigerian government authorities say the rescue of hundreds of schools girls who were kidnapped by militants last week is their top priority.

The safe release of scores of school girls abducted by militants last week topped the agenda of a meeting Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan held with political and military chiefs, a governor says.

"The meeting clearly agreed that the issue of the moment is Chibok... and that we must do everything to ensure that these abducted children are retrieved and protected," said Kayode Fayemi, who attended the meeting.

"The military assured us that they are doing everything in order to achieve this objective," Fayemi, governor of southwest Ekiti state, told journalists after the meeting on Thursday.

The mass abduction early of girls from a school in Chibok, Borno state, last week was blamed on Boko Haram Islamist militants.

It has been described as one of the most shocking attacks in the group's five-year extremist insurgency which has claimed thousands of lives.

Borno's government said 129 students were taken from the Government Girls Secondary School when gunmen stormed the town on April 14.

The school's principal, Asabe Kwambura, who later said she was working with parents to compile a complete registry of those taken, put the figure of girls abducted at 230.

More than 20 state governors as well as military and security chiefs attended Thursday's meeting, which lasted several hours in the Nigerian capital.

It agreed on the need to mount massive security awareness and invest in the "deployment of advanced security technology and prevention of proliferation of small arms and light weapons", two governors at the meeting said.

Some of the girls who escaped said the Islamists took the hostages to Borno's Sambisa Forest area, where Boko Haram is known to have well-fortified camps.

Parents have trekked through the bushlands of the remote region in a desperate search for their daughters, pooling money to buy fuel for motorcycles and cars.


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Source: AAP

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