Boko Haram agrees free kidnapped Nigerian girlsMore than 200 Nigerian girls kidnapped by Boko Haram in April will reportedly be freed now that the Islamist group and the Nigerian government have agreed to a cease-fire.
ABUJA, Nigeria, Oct. 17 (UPI) -- Boko Haram has agreed to a cease-fire with Nigeria and will release more than 200 girls who were abducted more than six months ago, reports say.
"A cease-fire agreement has been concluded between the federal government of Nigeria and the Njama'atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda'awati wal-Jihad (Boko Haram)," Chief of Defense Staff Air Marshal Alex Badeh said in a statement Friday.
All chiefs are "to comply with the cease-fire agreement between Nigeria and Boko Haram in all theaters of operations," he said.
Separately, Danladi Ahmadu, the self-styled secretary-general of the Islamist militant group, confirmed to Voice of America that his group had agreed to a cease-fire.
About 270 girls were kidnapped by Boko Haram from their school in northeastern Nigeria on April 14, touching off an international social media campaign to ramp up pressure on the Nigerian government and the international community to bring them home.
Fifty-seven of the girls were able to escape.
Boko Haram leader "Abubakar Shekau" has threatened in the past to sell his captives as slave brides unless militants were released from jail. It is not clear what conditions were agreed upon in Friday's cease-fire that resulted in the deal to free them.
The truce comes just two weeks after "Shekau" -- believed by the Nigerian government to be an impostor, and that the real Shekau has been dead for years -- was killed in a counter-terrorism operation.
Nearly 30,000 Nigerians have been killed in the religious, ethnic and political conflict that has raged since 1998. Boko Haram is believed responsible for at least 11,000 deaths through June 2013, according to a Johns Hopkins report.
