A Nigerian girl from the same village as 270 of the girls kidnapped by Islamic extremists Boko Haram is speaking out about her family being slaughtered by the terrorists.
Deborah Peters delivered a talk at the Hudson Institute where she talked about her brother and father getting gunned down by the terrorists. Peters said that she was at home with her brother on December 21, 2011 when gunfire broke out in her hometown of Chibok.
“So my brother called my dad and told him not to come home because they are fighting and my father told him to just forget about it,” Peters said.
Her father came home and a few hours later the terrorists stormed into their home and demanded her father, a Christian pastor whose church had been destroyed earlier in the year by the Islamists, renounce his faith in Christ.
“He told him that he would rather die than to go to hellfire,” Peters said. The terrorists then shot him three times in the chest while she watched. Then they turned their guns on her younger brother because they said he would grow up to be a pastor if they didn’t kill him.
Emmanuel Ogebe, an international human rights lawyer, attended the event and said that what we’re seeing now has been happening for years.
“What is happening now is this is persecution on steroids. Northern Nigerian Christians are used to being killed a couple of times a year,” Ogebe said. “But for terrorists to come out and abduct 300 kids, this is where Northern Nigerian Christians are saying ‘okay, we didn’t sign up for this.'”
Analysts in Africa say the kidnapping of almost 300 girls by the Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram could be a mistake that leads to the destruction of the group.
Rev. Kristopher Keating of World Horizons USA, said the uproar in Nigeria and around the world is putting a focus on the terrorists they didn’t anticipate. The Nigerian people are also taking advantage of the sudden world stage to show the suffering the Islamists have brought to the country.
“People are hungry to know that their suffering here is not going unnoticed, that reports of this particular instance of large scale abduction are, for seemingly the first time in this country, causing people to take to demonstration and public outcry against Boko Haram,” Keating told The Christian Post on Monday evening. “This could be a catalyzing event that breaks Boko Haram in Nigeria.”
Rev. Keating said many Christian leaders from around the world are traveling to the African nation to lead worship and prayer services to ask God to bring the girls home safely and for protection over the soldiers who are trying to bring the terrorists to justice.
Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram has released a video where they offer to release some of the girls they kidnapped in return for terrorists behind held in Nigerian prisons.
Terrorist leader Abubakar Shekau says in the 17-minute video that he will only release the girls that have not “submitted” to the terrorists, which from the video implies they have converted to Islam and are serving as slaves to the terrorists.
“The girls, these girls you occupy yourself with…we have indeed liberated them,” Shekau said. “These girls have become Muslims. We will never release them until after you release our brethren. Here I mean those girls who have not submitted.”
The international search for the kidnapped girls is now increasing in speed as teams from the United States and Great Britain arrive in Nigeria. The international effort is very diverse with countries as small as Israel sending in special forces units to help try to find and save the girls.
The United States Department of State announced they are offering to send a team into Nigeria to find the over 200 girls kidnapped by the Islamic terror group Boko Haram.
The offer comes as Boko Haram has made another brazen attack on a Nigerian village, murdering 150 people at a crowded outdoor marketplace. The terrorists laughed and yelled “Allahu Akbar” as they threw improvised bombs and fired rocket-propelled grenades into innocent civilians.
The terrorists also set fire to buildings where people tried to take shelter from the murderous rampage.
State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the U.S. will establish a “coordination cell” to provide intelligence, investigations and expertise in hostage negotiation. U.S. military personnel will be part of the cell and based at the U.S. Embassy in Abuja.
A spokesman for British Prime Minister David Cameron said they will be sending experts to assist the American team.
Boko Haram has kidnapped more girls.
The Islamic terrorist group, currently the subject of an international hunt after kidnapping over 200 girls from a school last month, abducted eight more girls from northeastern Nigeria overnight.
The girls were aged 12 to 15 like the other girls the group has kidnapped.
Residents of the village of Warabe said that the terrorists fired on homes in the village during the raid.
“They were many, and all of them carried guns. They came in two vehicles painted in army color. They started shooting in our village,” a villager told Yahoo news.
The girls were reportedly thrown into a truck with livestock and food and rushed out of the village. The Islamists have not commented whether those girls will be auctioned off as they threatened to do with the first batch of kidnapped girls.
Nigerian officials admitted they mislead the media regarding an attack by Islamic extremists Boko Haram where they invaded a girl’s school and carried off the students.
Security officials had initially said that 85 girls were taken but now admit the terrorist group seized 234 girls.
The admission from the regional military officials came after the governor of Borno state demanded to be taken to the site of the attacks and be allowed to question troops that were supposed to be protecting the school.
Military police say they are in “hot pursuit” of the kidnappers but none of the girls have been found. The girls, between 16 and 18, were reportedly science students at the school undergoing physics exams.
Boko Haram has pledged to kidnap Christian girls in the region to force into conversion to Islam and forced marriages. Girls who have been rescued from previous Boko Haram kidnappings say they were forced to be cooks and sex slaves.
Boko Haram has increased their actions this year, with over 1,500 people killed and thousands kidnapped.
Seventy-one people died and over 120 were injured when a bomb exploded under a bus in a crowded bus station in Abuja, Nigeria.
Christian leaders in the nation said that the attack was carried out by the Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram in their deadliest attack on the country’s capital.
Friar Patrick Tor Alumuku, the director of Communications for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Abuja, told reporters that the bus depot where the explosion happened destroyed 16 luxury busses and 24 minibuses.
“The bus depot where the explosion took place is normally used by a large number of commuters to get to work in the center of the capital,” FFr. Alumuku said. “The victims are therefore normal people, who belong to the working class.”
The bus station was described as being in a “poor, ethnically and religiously mixed” area. Boko Haram has been working to create a civil war in the nation that is almost evenly split between Christians and Muslims.
A group of Muslims attacked Christian farmers near Kano, Nigeria on Sunday, killing more than 100 and injuring dozens more.
The attackers also destroyed all the property of the Christian farmers, burning their homes to the ground.
The admission of the deaths by the government was complicated by the additional news this was the second straight week of Christian farmers being slaughtered by Muslim groups.
Chenshyi village chief Nehu Moses told journalists that gunmen slaughtered the church’s pastor, his wife and then gunned down their children. After that, they ransacked through the area killing at least 50 in his village.
Local government acting chairman Daniel Anyip told Time that at least three villages were destroyed during the assault.
An surprise terror attack on a school just before dawn has left at least 29 children dead.
Nigerian military spokesman said Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram targeted the school before dawn so they could kill as many children as possible before they realized they were under attack.
A teacher in the school told reporters that the terrorists set fire to a boy’s dormitory and then stood by any window that did not have bars in front of it to slit the throats of any student who tried to escape the flames.
Spokesman Abdullahi Bego said he could not tell why the school was left unprotected by government troops and that the state’s Governor would ask the federal government why they were not there. Students and teachers quickly abandoned another school in the state after military troops withdrew their protection Monday.
“Oh, God, by your name, save me. … The Lord sustains my life.”
Harrison Odjegba Okene repeated those words as he spent three days trapped under a capsized boat at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. A video of the man’s dramatic rescue went viral this week showing his amazing rescue.
A dive team working out of Lagos, Nigeria had been working to salvage a tugboat that capsized and sank. They had already pulled four bodies from the vessel when a diver noticed another hand on his video monitor. When he went to grab it, the hand grabbed him back.
“He was incredibly lucky. He was in an air pocket, but he would have had a limited time (before) … he wouldn’t be able to breathe anymore,” Tony Walker of Dutch company DCN Diving told the Washington Post.
Okene says his life was saved only by divine intervention. He told reporters that he kept repeating a psalm that his wife had sent him via text message earlier in the day.
“I started calling on the name of God,” Okene said. “I started reminiscing on the verses I read before I slept. I read the Bible from Psalms 54 to 92. My wife had sent me the verses to read that night when she called me before I went to bed.”