Nigeria's Boko Haram takes responsibility

• ‘I abducted your girls,’ Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau said in a video
• God instructed me to sell them, they are his properties: Shekau

Abuja: The Islamist militant group Boko Haram claimed responsibility on Monday for the abduction of 230 schoolgirls during a raid in the village of Chibok in northeast Nigeria last month, the French news agency AFP reported, citing a video it had obtained.

"I abducted your girls," Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau said in the video, according to AFP. It did not immediately give further details. Boko Haram on April 14 stormed an all-girl secondary school in the village of Chibok, in Borno state, then packed the teenagers, who had been taking exams, onto trucks and disappeared into a remote area along the border with Cameroon.

Boko Haram, which means "Western education is forbidden" has staged numerous previous attacks on educational institutions in northern Nigeria. Shekau said the girls should not have been in school in the first place, but rather should get married. "God instructed me to sell them, they are his properties and I will carry out his instructions," he said. The brazenness and sheer brutality of the school attack has shocked Nigerians, who had been growing accustomed to hearing about atrocities in an increasingly bloody five-year-old Islamist insurgency in the north.

Boko Haram, now seen as the main security threat to Africa's leading energy producer, is growing bolder and extending its reach. The kidnapping occurred the same day as a bomb blast, also blamed on Boko Haram, that killed 75 people on the edge of Abuja and marked the first attack on the capital in two years.

The militants repeated that attack a week later in almost exactly the same spot, killing 19 people and wounding 34 in the suburb of Nyanya.

The girls' abductions have been hugely embarrassing for the government and threaten to distract attention from its first hosting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) for Africa, this week.