ICC Note: Recently rescued Chibok girl Amina Ali Nkeki reveals shocking details about her forced marriage to a Boko Haram fighter and about her harrowing experience being abducted by the Islamist terror group in northern Nigeria. The girl who was the first rescued more than one month ago since the mass abduction in April 2014 told her story through a spokesman for the Chibok parents. Nkeki spoke of forced conversion to Islam, but she says that she never gave up her Christian faith internally. Despite northern Nigeria being predominantly Muslim, many villages in Chibok Local Government Area (LGA) and in southern Borno State are majority Christian.

07/05/2016, Chibok, Nigeria (BBC News) – A month ago, the first of a group of more than 200 schoolgirls kidnapped from Chibok was freed in north-eastern Nigeria after two years in the hands of Islamist militant group Boko Haram.

The girl gained widespread coverage when she was taken to meet President Muhammadu Buhari.

Her brother, who was overwhelmed to be reunited with his sister, was told to return home by state officials during the visit and says he now has no idea of the whereabouts of her or their mother, who accompanied them.

Yakubu Nkeki, a spokesman for the parents of the missing Chibok schoolgirls, and a close friend of the girl, says he has known her since childhood and he too hasn’t had contact with her since her visit to meet the president.

He told the BBC how, after she was first released, they sat together for hours and she recounted her ordeal from the very beginning.

Kidnap

While describing how she was taken from her school in Chibok town, she laughed, something Mr. Nkeki says he found very out of place.

“After they were taken from the school,” he tells me, “they were put in one place as a large group but after a few weeks they were taken further into the Sambisa Forest. There, some of the larger girls were forced to marry the militants, but at that time she was not given up for marriage because she was seen as a small girl.”

She was terrified at the thought of being forced to marry someone she did not know or love but she was also relieved that she had been spared.

She spoke of the many military airstrikes on the Boko Haram fighters which meant the group had to move around often to avoid detection. The girls were then split into smaller groups and moved to different locations.

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