A man claiming to be Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau has said more than 200 girls kidnapped by the group six months ago were "married off" to its fighters, contradicting Nigerian government claims they would soon be freed. Nigeria's military says it killed Shekau a year ago, and authorities said in September that they had killed an imposter posing as him in videos.
In the video recording obtained by Reuters on Saturday, the man's face is difficult to see as he is filmed from a distance. "We have married them off and they are all in their husbands' houses," the man claiming to be Shekau says. "The over 200 Chibok girls have converted to Islam, which they confess is the best religion. Either their parents accept this and convert too or they can die."
The majority of the kidnapped girls were Christians. It was not possible to independently verify the video, but it was given to local journalists through the same channels that Boko Haram has used to distribute video tapes for the past three years, in what has become the militant group's sole means of communicating messages through the media. It was also the classic style seen in the group's previous videos - the purported leader is standing in semi-desert scrubland surrounded by fourteen masked gunmen with four military jeeps in the background. Two of the gunmen are holding up Boko Haram's al Qaeda-inspired black flag. Verifying the authenticity of the video was further complicated by the fact that the group is made of several competing, and sometimes co-operating, factions with little in the way of a centralised command structure.
Whoever the figure in the video is, its release is likely to raise doubts about whether talks between a Boko Haram faction and the government in neighbouring Chad will secure the release of the girls, who were kidnapped from a secondary school in Chibok, north-east Nigeria, in April.
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