The release of the 82 girls came with a price, BBC
reports. Five senior Boko Haram militants were moved from a high
security unit to be driven to freedom. The
details of the deal are sketchy. Our sources don’t want to be named and
their version of events is hard to confirm, but they say the men were
high-level Boko Haram bomb-makers, and that they were accompanied by two
million euros in cash. Paying
a ransom as well as swapping prisoners was a sticking point that almost
unravelled the whole deal, one source tells us. President Buhari has
not revealed if a ransom was paid “It
should have happened sooner, but the president was hesitating about
freeing the five – and especially about the money,” says the person with
detailed knowledge of the deal. Persuading
him was “very, very difficult. It was the most difficult part of the
whole negotiation. He didn’t want to pay any money. “The
ransom was two million euros. Boko Haram asked for euros. They chose
the suspects and they gave us the list of girls who would be
freed.”Governments rarely admit to paying a ransom, and this claim could
not be independently verified. Reaching
that point took a lot of time and there were many setbacks, but trust
was gradually built on both sides. The Nigerian army’s surge of military
success helped strengthen the government’s hand.