The convoy transporting the recently seized young men was intercepted in Lake Chad area.
The Chadian military over the weekend freed 85 young Nigerian young men who were abducted by Boko Haram insurgents on Sunday, August 10, 2014 in Doron Baga community in Nigeria’s Borno State, the French newspaper, Le Monde reported yesterday, August 17, 2014.
The paper cited an unnamed senior security in Maiduguri, the Borno State capital as confirming the news. An official of the Nigerian Human Rights Commission in Maiduguri also confirmed the information. The source said the hostages were set free when soldiers at a checkpoint on the Chadian side of Lake Chad stopped a long convoy of buses transporting the young men, which was guarded by six armed men.
The human rights official said 30 other hostages were still in the keeping of the militants. Their abductors fled back across the lake with them in speed boats when they noticed that Chadian soldiers had intercepted the convoy. The militants struck Doron Baga, a fishing community in Lake Chad, late last Sunday evening, seizing at least 100 people, including a few women, reports said.They killed 28 people, set homes ablaze before transporting their hostages in speed boats in the direction of Chad.
Al Jazeera TV quoted survivors who fled to Maiduguri as saying that some 97 people remained unaccounted for in Doron Baga. "They left no men or boys in the place; only young children, girls and women," said Halima Adamu, sobbing softly and looking exhausted after a 180 km road trip at the back of a truck. "They were shouting 'Allah Akbar' (God is greatest), shooting sporadically. They started parking our men and boys into their vehicles, threatening to shoot whoever disobeyed them. Everybody was scared," she explained.
The recent kidnappings came four months after Boko Haram, which is fighting to reinstate a medieval Islamic caliphate in religiously mixed Nigeria, abducted more than 200 female students from the village of Chibok in Borno State. The girls are still to be rescued.
