A Nigerian nurse, Alice Loksha, who was kidnapped by terrorists, has escaped after six years in which she was forced into two marriages.
Loksha, who had been a health worker for the United Nations Childrens Fund (UNICEF) in the North-East of Nigeria, was presented by the military to newsmen at a base in Maiduguri, on Friday.
She was kidnapped on March 1, 2018, when the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) terrorist group staged a deadly raid on a camp housing 60,000 displaced people. Three UNICEF health workers and eight soldiers were killed in the attack.
Loksha was kidnapped along with two Nigerian midwives Saifura Khorsa and Hauwa Liman who had been working for the International Committee of the Red Cross, (ICRC). The ICRC workers were later killed, with ISWAP terrorists saying they killed the midwives because they were Muslims who should have known the consequences of working for international agencies.
Nigerian Army’s Major-General Kenneth Chigbu told reporters that, Loksha was spared and turned into a sex slave because she is Christian, reports say. She was lucky to escape on October 24, 2024, from a camp in Dogon-Chukwu island, in Lake Chad. Five days later, she contacted Nigerian troops at Gaidam in neighbouring Yobe State, to inform them about the escape.
Loksha, a married woman, had had two children before her capture. A UN source in the region told AFP that efforts were on-going to resolve complications surrounding her future. We have a delicate situation in our hands, because her husband had remarried after her kidnap, thinking she was already dead; and now here she is with another mans child.
