Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan pledged on Thursday to find more than 200 schoolgirls abducted by Islamist rebels, as the hostage crisis overshadowed his opening address to a major conference designed to showcase investment opportunities in Africa's biggest economy.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum (WEF) being hosted in the capital Abuja, Jonathan thanked foreign nations including the United States, Britain, France and China for their support in trying to rescue the girls, who were kidnapped from a secondary school on April 14 by the Islamic militant group Boko Haram.
U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama showed her support for the kidnapped girls on social media, posting a picture of herself on Facebook and Twitter, along with a message saying her thoughts and prayers were with the girls and their families.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also lent her voice to the international outcry.
On Wednesday Clinton expressed her outrage and called for action.
"It's criminal. It's an act of terrorism and it really merits the fullest response possible. First and foremost from the government of Nigeria,” Clinton said.
Jonathan thanked delegates for coming despite the danger posed by the militants, then quickly moved on to a speech about creating jobs in African economies.
“As a nation we are facing attack from terrorism,'' Jonathan told delegates. ``I believe that the kidnap of these girls will be the beginning of the end of terrorism in Nigeria.”
Despite such pledges, Jonathan admitted on national television this week that he had no idea where the girls were.
The recent kidnappings and numerous other attacks by Boko Haram have overshadowed Nigeria's hosting of the forum, an annual gathering of the rich and powerful that replicates the one in Davos, Switzerland.
Foreign aid
The U.S. military said Wednesday that U.S. advisers would arrive within days to help with communications, logistics and intelligence. Britain has promised to provide satellite imagery, while France says it will send security agents. China became the latest nation to offer help on Thursday.
In the latest big Islamist attack in Nigeria, 125 people were killed on Monday when gunmen rampaged through a town in the northeast near the Cameroon border.
A senator from Borno state, Ahmed Zannah, put the number killed at 300, although local politicians have sometimes been accused of exaggerating casualty figures for political reasons.
Either way, the scale and ferocity of the massacre in Gamburu again underscored how far Nigerian security forces are from protecting civilians in an increasingly violent region.
On Tuesday, residents of another village in the remote northeastern area where the schoolgirls were kidnapped said another eight girls were seized by suspected members of Boko Haram.
Group threatens to ‘sell’ girls
Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau has threatened in a video to sell the girls abducted on April 14 from a secondary school in Chibok ``on the market," prompting a warning from the United Nations that this would make the perpetrators liable for war crimes.
Nigerian police on Wednesday offered a $300,000 reward for “credible” information leading to the location and rescue of the students.
Boko Haram's five-year-old insurgency is aimed at reviving a medieval Islamic caliphate in modern Nigeria, whose 170 million people are split roughly evenly between Christians and Muslims, and it is becoming by far the biggest security threat to Africa's top oil producer.
The inability of security forces to protect the girls from being attacked or find them in more than three weeks has sparked national and international outrage and led to protests in Abuja and the commercial capital of Lagos.
Nigerian Women March for Rescue of Chibok Girls