It was on this exact date—April 14—two years ago when hundreds of teenage girls were kidnapped by gunmen from their Nigerian school dormitory in the middle of the night.
Since their disappearance, little was known about their wellbeing or state of mind, but on Wednesday, April 13 CNN obtained video footage of “Chibok Girls” sent to negotiators and captors as proof of life by Boko Haram.
Now, for the first time, the parents of those girls have also seen the video believed to have been made last December.
Bring Back Our Girls Co-Founder Urges World to Keep Searching
“My Saratu!” cried Rifkatu Ayuba, who spotted her now 17-year-old daughter on the screen. “I felt like removing her from the screen. If I could, I would have removed her from the screen.”
The two-minute video shows 15 of the 276 Christian girls who are believed to have been taken and forced into an Islamic conversion.
One mother, whose daughter was not among those shown in the video said as she watched, “I didn’t see my daughter, but I now have hope that she is alive.”
“We know that the girls are alive and they are hidden,” she said. “We are not worried. Our daughters look well.”
The video features a male voice off camera who asks a girl a series of questions including, “What’s your name? Was that your name at school? Where were you taken from?”
One of the girls, identified as Naomi Zakaria, made a scripted plea that she and the other kidnapped victims are okay.
“I am speaking on 25 December 2015, on behalf of all the Chibok girls and we are all well,” she said.
Since their disappearance, the campaign #BringBackOurGirls has emerged to help call attention and aid to help locate the missing young women. So far there has been no luck.