Where Are The Missing Nigerian Schoolgirls?
Children are abducted with depressing regularity in African conflicts, but the seizure of more than 250 schoolgirls in Nigeria is a particularly strange and baffling case.
The radical Islamist group Boko Haram has now released a video saying it seized the girls from their boarding school on April 14 in the small, remote town of Chibok in northeastern Nigeria, the region where the group has waged a violent insurgency over the past five years.
"I abducted your girls. I will sell them in the market, by Allah," the group's leader Abubakar Shekau says in the video.
The girls, ages 16 to 18, have been missing for three weeks, and the government had, until Sunday, said virtually nothing about the case or its efforts to find them.
The case is now starting to receive international attention, partly due to social media, including Twitter's #BringBackOurGirls.
Here are a few of the basics about the missing girls: