Nigeria Might Consider Option Of Exchanging Chibok Girls With Boko Haram Prisoners.

Nigeria said it was considering a prisoner exchange with Boko Haram after the Islamist group threatened to hold schoolgirls it abducted last month until detained members are freed.Abubakar Shekau, leader of the militant sect, made the claim in a video sent to reporters today that shows about 130 girls reciting lines from the Koran. It wasn’t clear where the video was shot and if the girls in the footage were those abducted.“These girls have become our property, whatever we wish, we do with them” Shekau said in the video, speaking in the Hausa language of northern Nigeria. “These girls remain with us until the Nigerian government releases our brothers and sisters being held in various detention facilities across the country.”The kidnapping of the 276 schoolgirls from their dormitories on April 14 has sparked international outrage and offers of help, while heightening pressure on Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan, whose administration was criticized in Nigeria for not speaking publicly about the incident for almost three weeks.Prisoner exchange is “part of the options available to us,” Mike Omeri, director of the National Orientation Agency, which explains government policies to the public, told reporters in Abuja. “If it is necessary that we use whatever kind of action to get our girls out of captivity, we will.”Rescue EffortsNigeria has accepted an Israeli offer to join countries including the U.S. and U.K. in helping to rescue the schoolgirls abducted from the town of Chibok in Borno state, Jonathan’s office said yesterday. The U.S. has a team of 16 military personnel working on the mission, Army Colonel Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman, told reporters today. A team from the U.K. also arrived in the country on May 9 to aid rescue efforts, while France and China have also pledged support.Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Jonathan yesterday to offer help, presidential spokesman Reuben Abati said in an e-mailed statement yesterday. Israel expressed its “deep shock” over the abductions, Netanyahu’s office said in a statement.“Nigeria would be pleased to have Israel’s globally acknowledged anti-terrorism expertise deployed to support its ongoing operations,” Jonathan told Netanyahu, according to the statement.Social-media campaigners using the Twitter hashtag #BringBackOurGirls say they have organized marches in Nigeria’s commercial capital, Lagos, and Benin City in the south of the country, this week.France Summit“I personally believe that their involvement will assist in no small measure towards rescuing our daughters,” Emmanuel Mutah, a 47-year-old father of two of the missing girls, said by phone today from Chibok. Both his biological daughter Saratu Emmanuel, 17, and Elizabeth Joseph, 19, whom he adopted, were abducted.France plans to host a summit with Nigeria and its neighboring countries in Paris on May 17, French President Francois Hollande said yesterday. The meeting will discuss security and the threat of Boko Haram, he said.Jonathan said yesterday he was “optimistic” that given the overseas support for the search for the schoolgirls, “success will soon be achieved.”In a previous video, Shekau threatened to sell the girls in “markets” and marry them off, helping to galvanize a global campaign to free them joined by U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama and Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai.Boko Haram carried out the school raid on the same day it detonated a car bomb on the outskirts of Abuja that killed at least 75 people, the city’s worst bomb attack.The Nigerian security services arrested five people suspected of involvement in that assault, State Security Service spokeswoman Marilyn Ogar told reporters in Abuja today.That blast was followed on May 1 by another bomb nearby, less than a week before Abuja hosted the World Economic Forum on Africa, a global meeting of about 1,000 executives and politicians.

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Gbenga Akingbule in Maiduguri