A new video released by Islamist militants Boko Haram claims to show around 100 girls kidnapped from a school in Nigeria last month, to have converted to Islam.
The video, released on Monday claims to show the girls praying after the conversation. The group's leader, Abubakar Shekau has also said that the kidnapped girls will be held until all imprisoned militants had been freed.
This shows that even after increased call from the international community, including the special initiative taken by American First lady Michelle Obama to have the girls released, have not yet yielded any constructive results.
In the new 17-minite video obtained by French news agency AFP and cited by various news sources, three of the girls – wearing the full-length Hijab—are shown speaking.
Two girls are heard saying that they were previously Christians and have now converted to Islam, while the other says she is Muslim, BBC reports.
"These girls, these girls you occupy yourselves with...we have indeed liberated them. These girls have become Muslims," Abubakar Shekau is heard saying in the video.
Majority of the abducted girls belonged to Christian communities, while some of them were Muslims, according to reports.
BBC has noted that there is no indication of where or when the video was taken, although the location appears to be a remote one. Reports in Nigeria have said that the girls appeared calm in the video and one of the girls said that they had not been harmed.
The video shows only about 130 of the 276 pupils abducted from the school in the northern state of Borno, an indication that the girls could have been divided into smaller groups to avoid being detected.
Boko Haram (translated as 'Western education is forbidden') argues that girls should not have to be at school and instead should get married.
The latest video was released after Governor Kashim Shettima of Nigeria's Brono had earlier stated that he had information on the whereabouts of the schoolgirls and that he had passed the reports of the sightings to the military for verification.
Boko Haram abducted the girls on 14 April and threatened to sell them soon after, in another video.
