Horrific experience of kidnapped Chibok girls captured in secret diaries

Secret dairies kept by the girls while in captivity, which were obtained by the news organisation, showed that the terrorists whisked them away after their (Boko Haram) robbery operation in the school failed.

The girls, who spent three brutal years in the terrorists' captivity, were kidnapped from their hostel at the Government Secondary School, Chibok, Borno State by Boko Haram fighters on April 14, 2014.

In the diaries, one of the girls, Naomi Adamu, said Boko Haram's primary operation at the chibok school was to to steal machinery for house building.

But when they did not find what they were looking for, the terrorists were not sure if they should attack the girls or kidnap them.

"One boy said they should burn us all, and they (some of the other fighters) said, ‘No, let us take them with us to Sambisa (Boko Haram’s remote forest base) … if we take them to Shekau (the group’s leader), he will know what to do,’" Adamu wrote.

Adamu was among 82 of the Chibok girls released by Boko Haram in May – part of a second batch after 21 of them were freed in October. The rescued girls are said to be going through a "restoration process" at an undisclosed location in Abuja

About 113 of the girls are believed to be still held by the militants.

The girls said they started documenting their ordeal a few months after the abduction, when the terror group gave them exercise books to use during Koranic lessons.

To hide the diaries from their captors, the girls would bury the notebooks in the ground, or carry them in their underwear.

The diaries were said to have been written by Adamu and her friend, Sarah Samuel - the authenticity of the book cannot be verified.

It was gathered that three of the other Chibok girls also contributed to the bitter tale, with some parts written in less coherent Hausa.

"We wrote it together. When one person got tired, she would give it to another person to continue," Adamu, 24, said from the state safe house in Abuja.

According to them, life in Sambisa involved regular beatings, Koranic lessons, domestic labour and pressure to marry and convert.

When five girls tried to escape, the militants tied them up, dug a hole in the ground, and turned to one of their classmates, the report said.

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The jihadists were said to have handed her a blade and said 'cut off the girls’ heads, or lose your own’.

"We are begging them. We are crying. They said if next we ran away, they are going to cut off our necks," Adamu wrote.

On another occasion, the militants gathered those girls who had refused to embrace Islam, brought out jerry cans purportedly filled with petrol and threatened to burn them alive.

"They said, ‘You want to die. You don’t want to be Muslim, (so) we are going to burn you," the diary entry read.

The militants later burst into laughter – the cans contained nothing but water, the girls wrote.

While in captivity, some of the girls were said to have escaped, and ended up in a nearby shop where they asked the owners for help, as well as food and water.

"The girls said, ‘We are those that Boko Haram kidnapped from (the school) in Chibok,’” Adamu wrote.

"One of the people (in the shop) said: ‘Are these not Shekau’s children?’"

Although the shop owners let the girls stay the night, they took them back to Boko Haram’s base the next day.

The girls were whipped and threatened with decapitation.