Extremists have abducted 91 more people, including toddlers as young as 3, in weekend attacks on villages in Nigeria, witnesses said Tuesday, providing fresh evidence of the military's failure to curb an Islamic uprising and the government's inability to provide security.
The kidnappings come less than three months after more than 200 schoolgirls were taken in a mass abduction that embarrassed Nigeria's government and military because of their slow response. Those girls are still being held captive.
The most recent victims included 60 girls and women, some of whom were married, and 31 boys, witnesses said.
A local official confirmed the abductions, but security forces denied them.
There was no way to safely and independently confirm the report from Kummabza, 150 kilometers (95 miles) from Maiduguri, capital of Borno state and headquarters of a military state of emergency that has failed to curtail near-daily attacks by Boko Haram fighters.
Last week, a presidential committee investigating the April kidnappings stressed that they did happen and clarified the number of students who have been kidnapped. It said there were 395 students at the school — 119 who escaped during the siege of the school and another 57 who escaped in the first couple of days of their abduction, leaving 219 unaccounted for.
U.S. Rep. Chris Smith met earlier this month with one of the girls who escaped.
"Almost two months later, clearly she was still traumatized — you could hear it in her quivering voice and see it in her eyes. Yet she spoke mostly of her deep concern for her friends and classmates still in captivity and pleaded for their immediate rescue," he said in a statement issued Tuesday.
But Smith, a Republican from New Jersey, also quoted testimony to the House Foreign Relations Committee last week by another former U.S. ambassador, Robin Renee Sanders, who warned that "Nigeria is in the beginning of a long war. ... There is no easy fix."
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