230 girls abducted in Nigeria still missing

A week after Islamic extremists stormed a remote boarding school in northeast Nigeria, more than 200 girls and young women remain missing despite a "hot pursuit" by security forces and an independent search by desperate fathers who headed into a dangerous forest to find their daughters.
At Chibok, the scene of the attack, weeping parents cried yesterday, begging the kidnappers to "have mercy on our daughters," and for the government to rescue them.
"I have not seen my dear daughter, she is a good girl," cried Musa Muka, whose 17-year-old Martha was taken away. "We plead with the government to help rescue her and her friends; we pray nothing happens to her."

Although at least 200 remain missing, dozens of the students managed to escape their captors, jumping from the back of an open truck after they were kidnapped in the pre-dawn hours of Tuesday last week or by running away and hiding in the dense forest.
The number who escaped depends on whom you speak to 39, 43, maybe more than 50.
The mass abduction is a major embarrassment for Nigeria's military, which had announced last week that security forces had rescued all but eight of those kidnapped and then was forced to retract the statement. It came from Defense Ministry spokesman Maj Gen Chris Olukolade.

"The operation is going on and we will continue to deploy more troops," Olukolade told AP, adding that air and land patrols are hunting for the students.

The Nigerian Air Force has halted what were near-daily air bombardments of the forest presumably because of the kidnapped students. The extremists have abducted handfuls of students in recent months but this mass kidnapping is unprecedented.
Nigeria's military is already confronted by mounting criticism over its failure to curb the 5-year-old Islamic uprising despite having draconian powers under an 11-month state of emergency in three northeastern states covering one-sixth of the country.
It seems every time the military trumpets a success in its "onslaught on terrorists," the extremists step up the tempo and deadliness of attacks.

More than 1,500 people have been killed in the insurgency so far this year, compared to an estimated 3,600 between 2010 and 2013.
Military and government claims that the extremists were cornered in the remote northeast were shattered by a massive explosion on April 14 at a bus station in Abuja, the capital in the centre of the country, which killed at least 75 people and wounded 141.