MAIDUGURI: Suspected Boko Haram gunmen kidnapped eight girls from a village near one of the Islamists’ strongholds in northeastern Nigeria overnight, police and residents said on Tuesday.

The abduction of the girls, aged 12 to 15, follows the kidnapping of more than 200 other schoolgirls by the militant group last month, whom it has threatened to sell into slavery.

Lazarus Musa, a resident of the village of Warabe, said that armed men had opened fire during the raid. “They were many and all of them carried guns. They came in two vehicles painted in army colour.

“They started shooting in our village,” he said by telephone from the village in the hilly Gwoza area, Boko Haram’s main base.

A police source said the girls were taken away on trucks, along with looted livestock and food.

Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau threatened in a video released to the media on Monday to sell the girls abducted from a secondary school on April 14 “on the market”.

The kidnappings by the Islamists, who say they are fighting for an Islamic state in Nigeria, have shocked a country long inured to the violence around the northeast.

They have also embarrassed the government before a World Economic Forum meeting on Africa, the annual gathering of the wealthy and powerful, in Abuja from May 7 to May 9.

Boko Haram, the main security threat to Africa’s leading energy producer, is growing bolder and appears better armed than ever.

“Many people tried to run behind the mountain but when they heard gun shots, they came back,” Musa said. “The Boko Haram men were entering houses, ordering people out of their houses.”

April’s mass kidnapping occurred on the day a bomb blast, also claimed by Boko Haram, killed 75 people on the edge of Abuja, the first attack on the capital in two years. Another bomb in roughly the same place killed 19 people last week.

The United Nations warned Boko Haram on Tuesday that if they carried out their leader’s threat to sell the girls, they would forever be liable to prosecution for war crimes, even decades after the event.

“We warn the perpetrators that there is an absolute prohibition against slavery and sexual slavery in international law.

“These can ... constitute crimes against humanity,” UN human rights spokesman Rupert Colville said in Geneva.

The military’s inability to find the girls in three weeks, has led to protests in the northeast, Abuja and Lagos, the commercial capital.

Britain and the United States have both offered to help track down the girls, but neither has given specifics, and neither has Nigeria specified what help, if any, it wants.—Reuters