The kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls held hostage by Boko Haram came agonisingly close to freedom before government officials called off a deal to swap them for jailed Islamist terror suspects, The Mail on Sunday has been told. A Nigerian journalist trusted by both the government and extremists from Boko Haram acted as go-between, risking his life on a one-man mission to enter the gunmen’s lair and broker an agreement, according to security sources.
But last Saturday, at the 11th hour, officials scrapped the exchange in a telephone call from a crisis summit in Paris where Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan met foreign ministers including those from Britain, the United States, France and Israel.
It was agreed there that no deals should be struck with terrorists and that force should instead be used against them.
The U-turn is said to have enraged Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau. Insiders believe that the cancellation of last Saturday’s plan and the ensuing stand-off now puts the girls’ lives in even greater danger. An intelligence source told The Mail on Sunday: ‘The next video we see from the terrorists could show the girls being killed one by one.’
Sources in the Nigerian capital Abuja described how Shekau had agreed to bring the girls out of their forest camps in the remote north-east of the country in the early morning and take them to a safe location for the prisoner swap. ‘They would have been dropped off in a village, one group at a time, and left there while their kidnappers disappeared. There was to be a signal to a mediator at another location to bring in the prisoners,’ sources said. A www.dailymail.co.uk extract.
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