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Boko Haram threatens to sell abducted Nigeria girls as slaves

– ‘I will sell them’ –

In the latest video, Shekau is seen dressed in combat fatigues standing in front of an armoured personnel carrier and two pick-up trucks mounted with sub-machine guns.

Six armed men stand beside him with their faces covered.

The images are occasionally blurry but eventually zoom in to Shekau, who speaks in the local Hausa language and Arabic, as well as English.

“I abducted a girl at a Western education school and you are disturbed. I said Western education should end. Western education should end. Girls, you should go and get married,” he said.

“I will repeat this: Western education should fold up. I abducted your girls. I will sell them in the market, by Allah,” Shekau said, adding that his group was holding the girls as “slaves”.

“I will marry off a woman at the age of 12. I will marry off a girl at the age of nine,” he says at another point in the video.

Unconfirmed reports from local leaders in Chibok suggested the girls had been taken across Nigeria’s borders to Chad and Cameroon, and sold as brides for as little as $12.

International attention on the plight of the missing girls was initially slow but has grown quickly in recent days, in part because of a social media campaign – #bringbackourgirls.

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One of the campaign’s leaders, Naomi Mutah, was arrested on Monday during an overnight meeting with First Lady Patience Jonathan for falsely claiming she was a mother of one of the abducted girls.

Another of the group’s leaders, Hadiza Bala Usman, said Mutah was representing mothers who could not make it to Abuja for the meeting with Jonathan and that the first lady had ordered her arrest.

Jonathan’s office denied that the first lady was involved. The reported arrest was widely criticised on social media on Monday and Mutah has since been released, Usman told AFP.

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