First missing Chibok girl found

The first of more than 200 schoolgirls missing after being kidnapped by Boko Haram militants from Chibok in northeast Nigeria more than two years ago has been found, a parents' spokesman told the Thomson Reuters Foundation yesterday.

Lawan Zannah, secretary of the association of parents of missing Chibok girls, said teenager Amina Ali was found on Tuesday near the Sambisa forest near the border with Cameroon.

The circumstances of her discovery have not yet been officially confirmed. "She was carrying a baby," Zannah said by phone from Chibok.

Reuters quoted the girl as saying that most of the kidnapped 219 girls are still in captivity in a forest in northeast Nigeria.

"She says all of the others are still in the Sambisa forest area. That they are heavily guarded," a statement from the #Bringbackourgirls activist group quoted Amina Ali Darsha Nkeki as saying after her rescue this week.

Boko Haram militants captured a total of 276 girls in a raid on their school in Chibok in April 2014. Dozens of them escaped in the initial melee but more than 200 remained unaccounted for.

The kidnapping of the Chibok girls in April 2014 from their school unleashed a wave of international outrage, backed by figures such as U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama under the Twitter hashtag #BringBackOurGirls.

The insurgents have killed an estimated 15,000 people and kidnapped hundreds of men, women and children in their six-year campaign to carve out a mediaeval Islamic caliphate in northeast Nigeria.