MAIDUGURI/YAOUNDE. – Parents in northern Nigeria say more than 100 girls are still missing three days after suspected Boko Haram extremists attacked their school.

The announcement on Thursday comes after government officials in Yobe state acknowledged that at least 50 young women remained unaccounted for in the Monday evening attack.

One parent, Bashir Manzo, told The Associated Press that the parents have compiled a list of 101 missing children, which they have presented to the governor. There have been a number of conflicting reports since the attack, in part because of limited access to the area.

Boko Haram abducted 276 girls from a boarding school in Chibok almost four years ago. While some escaped and many others were released as part of negotiations, about 100 remain with their captors.

Boko Haram jihadists kill 7 in Cameroon, Chad In a separate incident Boko Haram jihadists killed five civilians and two soldiers in fresh attacks in Cameroon and Chad, local sources said on Thursday.

“A group of Boko Haram fighters made an incursion during (Tuesday) night in Assigashia,” a source close to administrative authorities in the northern Cameroon border area said, asking not be named.

“The attackers killed five people and wounded five more.”

The raid was confirmed along with the casualty toll by an official in the Cameroon security services. Assigashia is a border town which gives direct access to Nigeria and has seen many Boko Haram incursions in the past.

The Nigerian jihadists are blamed for killing another civilian in the town in January. In Chad, meanwhile, two Chadian soldiers, including a captain, were killed in a Boko Haram ambush on Wednesday, a senior military official said on Thursday.

The attack took place in the west of the country in the Lake Chad region near the Nigerian frontier as the troops were returning from a border patrol.

“The Boko Haram attackers disappeared into the islands” on the lake, the source said.

Since 2014, the year Cameroon began to fight Boko Haram, the group has killed 2 000 civilians and soldiers and kidnapped about 1 000 people in the region, according to an analysis by the International Crisis Group (ICG) think tank.

Boko Haram, a militant movement opposed to Western influence and seeking an Islamic state based on Sharia law, has caused the deaths of at least 20,000 people since it took up arms in 2009.

Cameroon, Chad and Niger have all joined the military effort by Nigeria to crush Boko Haram.

Wednesday’s attack in Chad was the first known assault on Chadian territory by Boko Haram since May 2017, when nine soldiers were killed. – AP/AFP

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