Boko Haram Islamist militants in northern Nigeria are using children as human bombs.
The shocking revelation by the United Nations human rights wing also has it that the insurgent group is targeting women and girls for particularly horrific abuse, including sexual slavery.
Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, United Nations human rights chief told a special session of the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva that his office had received reports of Boko Haram using children as its first line of attack.
The insurgent group has also repeatedly used young children as human bombs. The latest case involved a 14-year-old girl carrying a baby on her back who detonated a bomb in a marketplace.
Boko Haram has killed thousands and displaced some 1.5 million people during a six-year campaign to carve out an Islamic state in northern Nigeria.
A joint offensive by Nigeria and its neighbours has succeeded in driving the group from most of the positions they controlled earlier this year, reversing militants’ gains that forced Nigeria to delay its February presidential election.
Zeid said that appalling atrocities committed by the group had created a critical human rights situation not only in Nigeria, but in the whole Lake Chad region.
The Council condemned inhuman actions of Boko Haram including the abduction of more than 200 girls from a school in Chibok, northeast Nigeria, a year ago.
Our intelligence services had reported earlier that a big percentage of the abducted girls had been married off to Boko Haram fighters where they had had undergone all kinds of assault and torture.
