DHAKA: Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari has said he is ready to negotiate with Boko Haram for the release of more than 200 girls kidnapped in April last year.

In a televised press conference on Wednesday, Buhari said that if the armed group could identify a credible leadership then the Nigerian government was ‘prepared to negotiate with them without any preconditions,’ Al Jazeera publishes this report on Thursday.

Boko Haram snatched the girls from dormitories in the northeastern town of Chibok in April 2014, sparking international condemnation of former president Goodluck Jonathan’s government and military for failing to rescue them.

Buhari, who was sworn in as president in May, said there is ‘no firm intelligence on where those girls are physically located and what condition they are in’.

He added, ‘I assure you that the cause of the Chibok girls is on our minds’.

Nigerian troops have clawed territory back from Boko Haram in recent months, and last week Buhari announced that the military had ‘technically won the war’ against the armed group.

Hundreds of captives have been freed in recent months, but no Chibok girls were among them.

BDST: 1548 HRS, DEC 31, 2015
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