Chibok Girls Remembered One Year On
It has been a whole year of pain for the relatives of the missing 219 Chibok girls.
Ceremonies are ongoing around the world to mark one year since more than 200 girls were abducted by militant Islamist group Boko Haram.
A procession is ongoing in Abuja, with 219 girls from various secondary schools who were picked as ambassadors for Chibok girls marching to the Federal Ministry of Education. Each girl is represents a missing Chibok girl.
There have been a few sightings of some of the abducted students but, none has been found.
Boko Haram say the girls have converted to Islam and been married off. A witness told an international news site that she saw more than 50 of them alive three weeks ago in the north-eastern town of Gwoza.
One mother said she sometimes arranges her 19-year-old daughter’s clothes in the hope that she is about to return home.
The scale of this conflict is so grim that the Chibok girls represent just a fraction of those seized by the jihadists. Many have escaped partly thanks to a recent military offensive – but not the Chibok girls.
High-profile figures such as Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai joined the rest of the world to drew attention to their plight on Twitter last year under the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag.
