Hundreds of parents and sympathisers of more than 200 schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram militants in northeast Nigeria met President Muhammadu Buhari yesterday to renew calls for their release.
The 300 or so marchers, many of them crying, trekked through the capital Abuja before being taken in buses for an audience with Buhari at his official residence.
After the behind-closed-doors meeting, former education minister Oby Ezekwesili, who leads the BringBackOurGirls protest group, said Buhari asked for more time to rescue the 219 schoolgirls.
A total of 276 teenagers were seized from their dormitories at the school in Chibok, in the northeastern state of Borno, on April 14, 2014.
Fifty-seven managed to escape soon afterwards but the others are still being held and have not been seen since they appeared in a Boko Haram video message released in May, 2014.
The abduction caused outrage around the world and focused attention on the bloody insurgency, which has left at least 17,000 dead since 2009 and forced some 2.6mn from their homes.
The BringBackOurGirls group has kept up the pressure on the government with regular demonstrations and daily vigils in Abuja.
But Ezekwesili said Buhari told them there was no “reliable intelligence that would enable them to rescue the girls as immediately as we are demanding”.
Buhari has said he is prepared to negotiate with any “credible” Boko Haram leaders for their release.
Some parents of the girls were so distraught that during the march they sat down in the middle of the road, weeping.
Buhari, who was elected last March, has promised to stop Boko Haram. Thousands of young women and girls have been captured in past years and in some cases raped, forcibly married, trained to fight and made to participate in armed attacks, sometimes on their own towns and villages, according to human rights group Amnesty International.