Nigerian leader ready to engage Boko Haram on abducted girls

In this file photo taken on Monday, April, 21. 2014, security walk past a burnt out government secondary school in Chibok, where gunmen abducted more than 200 students, Chibok, Nigeria. Attacks by Islamic extremist group Boko Haram in northeastern Nigeria and neighboring countries have forced more than 1 million children out of school, heightening the risk they will be abused, abducted or recruited by armed groups, the United Nations children’s agency said Tuesday, Dec. 22, 2015. AP File Photo

ABUJA, Nigeria—Nigeria’s leader says his government still is open to negotiating with Boko Haram extremists for the release of 209 schoolgirls kidnapped in April 2014.

President Muhammadu Buhari says they must first identify a credible leadership to engage. Other attempts under the previous administration failed because officials apparently were talking to the wrong people. Boko Haram is fragmented.

Hundreds of captives have been freed in recent months as Nigeria’s military has driven the Islamic extremists into a northeastern forest enclave. But none of the girls abducted from a school in Chibok town were among them.

Buhari said in a nationally televised “media chat” that there is “no firm intelligence on where those girls are physically located and what condition they are in.”

Boko Haram has kidnapped thousands of people.

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