Governor Kashim Shettima of Borno State says he is awaiting the arrival in Maiduguri of one of the schoolgirls captured by Boko Haram two years ago.
“I haven’t got any details… I learned the girl is on her way now.” Kashim Shettima told reporters.
Amina Ali, stolen along with 218 other girls from the Nigerian town of Chibok was found after being held by Boko Haram militants for over two years.
She was found wandering in the forest, uncle Yakubu Nkeki a foreign news agency.
He said the 19-year-old — she was 17 when she was abducted — was brought to Chibok Tuesday night for her identity to be verified and to be reunited with her mother.
Her father died while she was held captive, he said.
He said the soldiers then took the young woman away, apparently to a military camp in the town of Damboa.
There is the belief that other Chibok girls may also have been rescued by soldiers hunting down Boko Haram in the remote northeastern Sambisa Forest on Tuesday night, said Chibok community leader Pogu Bitrus.
He said he is working with officials to establish their identities.
The army said today after storming the Boko Haram camp in Njimia on Tuesday that troops rescued 41 hostages who were mostly women and children.
Boko Haram Islamic extremists stormed and firebombed the Government Girls Secondary School at Chibok on April 14, 2014, and seized 276 girls who were preparing to write West African School Certificate exams. Dozens escaped in the first hours, but 219 remained missing.
The inability of Nigeria’s government and military to rescue them led, in part, to the electoral defeat of President Goodluck Jonathan last year.
It’s not known how many thousands of girls, boys and young women have been kidnapped by Boko Haram in a nearly 7-year-old insurgency that has killed some 20,000 people and spread across Nigeria’s borders.
Nigeria’s military has reported freeing thousands this year as they have forced the extremists from towns and into strongholds in the sprawling Sambisa Forest.
*With AFP, AP and Reuters