House of Lords, the second chamber of UK Parliament, to
narrate her terrifying ordeal during one of the biggest ever
mass abductions carried out by the Boko Haram sect.
Victoria Yohanna will tell House of Lords of brutal
Boko Haram attack
According to The Telegraph, a 15-year-old girl was
one of more than 400 people abducted by the
terrorists during an attack on the north-east
Nigerian town of Baga in January.
October 13, Victoria, who managed to escape, will
recount her experiences to an audience at the
House of Lords. The event will mark the launch of a
major new report on the persecution of Christians
worldwide, which has been compiled by the charity
Aid to the Church in Need.
It is the first time when one of Boko Haram's
thousands of schoolgirl victims has travelled to the
UK to narrate her horrible ordeal.
Speaking to journalists ahead of the report's launch,
Victoria told how she was abducted along with her
mother and five siblings when insurgents attacked
her hometown just after New Year.
"We heard shooting and the sound of bombs in the
early hours of the morning, and at first I thought it
was the Nigerian army trying to protect us. Then I
realised it was Boko Haram. Those Boko Haram
members whose duty is to take women and children
for their caliphate took our entire family and made
us walk on foot to one of their camps," she said.
Victoria recalled that en route she saw numerous
corpses of people who had been killed and
beheaded by terrorists.
Then she spent two weeks at a Boko Haram camp
in the outskirts of Baga.
"Every morning they took the hostages for training
at Islamic school. They would say the Koran is the
religion God had for you," she added.
The girl revealed that she was able to fool the
militants into thinking she was a Muslim by
pretending to perform the "buta". Although there
were Muslim captives among the hostages who
knew she was a Christian, they did not give her
away.
One night, when terrorists went out to kidnap more
people, Victoria and the rest of her family managed
to escape from the camp.
"I knew what had happened to the Chibok
schoolgirls and was very scared. Were it not for
God we would probably all be dead by now," she
said.
Nigeria schoolgirl tells House of Lords of brutal Boko
Haram attack
Victoria has been accompanied to the UK by Father
Gideon Obasogie, a priest from Maiduguri, where
she is now living.
He recalled that when he met the girl for the first
time, she found it impossible to narrate her ordeal
without breaking down in tears.
"The church has been trying to organise counselling
sessions for these victims of Boko Haram. Simply
offering them confessional is not enough," he noted.
Meanwhile, President Muhammadu Buhari has
recently hosted the United Kingdom's Chief of
Defence Staff, General Nicholas Houghton. The
president told the top security chief that Nigeria still
needs more support from the British government in
its quest to defeat the
