Major General Kenneth Chigbu (C), deputy theatre commander and representative of Theatre Commander, with Alice Loksha (L) Fayina Ali (R) at Army Barrack Maim, another victim of ISWAP kidnap, in Maiduguri on November 15, 2024
Source; Vanguard
A Nigerian nurse, Alice Loksha, who was kidnapped by terrorists, has escaped after six years in which she was forced into two marriages.
The Nigerian military presented Alice Loksha to reporters at a military base in Maiduguri, North-East, on Friday. Loksha had been a health worker for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in the North-East of Nigeria.
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 midwinves because they were Muslims who “should have known the consequences of working for international agencies.”
Loksha was spared and turned into a sex slave because she is Christian, reports say.
Loksha was lucky to escape on October 24, 2024, from a camp in Dogon Chukwu island in Lake Chad, Nigerian army Major General Kenneth Chigbu told reporters.
Five days later, she contacted Nigerian troops at Geidam in neighbouring Yobe State, to inform them about the escape, Chigbu said.
Loksha, a married woman, had had two children before her capture. A UN source in the region told AFP that efforts were ongoing 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 man’s child,” the source told AFP.
