We don’t know Chibok girls’ whereabouts –Air Chief

• As NAF clocks 2,600 hours in search of Chibok girls

There seem to be no end in sight in the search for the missing Chibok Girls. The Nigeria Armed Forces has again revealed that it was yet to obtain any credible intelligence on the actual location where they were being detained by their captors.
Some Boko Haram terrorists had on April 14, 2014 abducted the school girls from their hostel at the Government Girls Secondary School, Chibok, Borno State. More than two years after, Nigerian security agencies have been on their trail but has been unable to locate or rescue them.
Chief of Air Staff, Air Marshal Sadique Abubakar, said that the non- rescue of the school girls was not for want of efforts and commitment but a function of absence of credible intelligence on their whereabouts.
Abubakar, who spoke in a chat with newsmen at the weekend disclosed that while it was generally believed that the girls were being held hostage in Sambisa Forest but neither the the ground troops of the Nigeria Army nor the reconnaissance aircraft of the Nigeria Air Force has been able to track them down to any specific location.
According to him, the Nigeria Air Force aircraft on ISR ( Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance) Mission clocked about 2,600 hours between January this year to 17th day of August, this year in search of the Chibok girls, all to no avail.
He said the drones of the Air Force comb Sambisa forest on a daily basis with the hope of gathering intelligence, be able to capture the movement of these girls or locate legitimate targets. “Honestly, we don’t know if the girls are still in Sambisa Forest. That is the truth of the matter.
There is no day that the sun rises and sets that we don’t go out hoping to see these girls. Even if you see people that are dressed in hijab in the forest, how are you sure they are women? The people can lure you to come in thinking that the girls are there but it is when you get there and they remove the hijab that you will now realisethat they have their rifles.
There is no credible intelligence to tell you that the girls are there. But we are working round the clock to ensure that we locate them.” “Sambisa Forest is about 60,000 square kilometers.
It extends even into Cameroun and that is why sometimes in the past, these terrorists could do whatever they liked and then sneak into Cameroun. But now, Cameroun is also hot for them and they are now coming back.
You can see the difficulty involved in ensuring that we cover every square inch of that forest. We still fly over Sambisa Forest on a regular basis but you see, there are issues with the terrain.
The terrain is very difficult, especially for the ground forces,” he said. The Air Force Chief debunked the claims by the insurgents in their recent video that some of the Chibok girls have been killed during an air strike by the Nigeria Air Force.
According to him, the video posted on the internet by the terrorist group was not a reflection of truth but merely concocted to whip up sentiments from members of the public.
“This is cheap propaganda. Even the IEDs that they developed, have you ever seen a complete body together after it has been detonated at any location? That is the crudest form of bomb but when you go there after an explosion, you don’t see anything.
Not to talk of a 250kg bomb. What they use for the IEDs, how many kilograms are we talking about? It is so insignificant. If you look at the clip, they positioned the girls there. Somebody even told me that he saw one of the girls even moving her head.
“All I can tell you is that just looking at the way they did it, you can clearly see that it couldn’t have been something that happened after an air strike. If you drop a bomb, there will be a crater. Where is the crater? If you drop a bomb, within certain meters radius of the point if impact, everybody there will be gone.”