Boko Haram Escapee Invited By UK Parliament

A Nigerian schoolgirl, Victoria Yohanna,
was invited by the 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.
Today, 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.
READ ALSO: Boko Haram Used Us like
Animals – Rescued Nigerians
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.
READ ALSO: Boko Haram Escapee
Recounts Experience In Sambisa Forest
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.
Victoria has been accompanied to the UK
by Father Gideon Obasogie, a priest from
Maiduguri.
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 terrorists.