LAGOS, Aug. 14 (Xinhua) -- Nigeria's military is examining the latest video from Boko Haram group purporting to show some of the kidnapped Chibok schoolgirls, an official said Sunday.
In a statement sent to Xinhua in Lagos, Nigeria's economic hub, Brigadier General Rabe Abubakar, spokesperson for the Defense Headquarters said the military is examining the video clip to verify its authenticity.
Some girls wearing headscarves, in the video, were seen behind a Boko Haram militant who demanded the release of fighters in return for freeing the girls. The militant also claimed that some of the girls have been killed in air strikes.
"Currently we are studying the video clips to verify its authenticity and analyzing the comments of the speakers in the video especially the terrorist member and the girl that spoke in mother tongue," he added.
Abubakar disputed allegations in the video that some of the kidnapped girls were hit by an airstrike.
"It is extremely difficult and rare to hit innocent people during airstrike because the operation is done through precision attack on identified and registered targets and locations," the defense spokesperson said.
According to him, the precision airstrike is very effective at taking out targeted enemies because it is not a random operation.
"We are nevertheless studying the video clips to examine if the victims died from other causes rather than from the allegation of airstrike," he added.
Recently, the Nigerian Airforce has focused on sustaining air operations and providing support to ground troops of the Armed Forces' strive to rid Nigeria of the Boko Haram insurgency.
The airstrikes are controlled by professionally trained officers who coordinate the strike with ground troops, after plentiful surveillance to limit casualty on the ground.
A faction of Boko Haram militants, which seeks to impose strict Islamic law in northern Nigeria, on Sunday released a new video showing the abducted Chibok girls and claiming that some of the girls were killed by air strikes launched by the Nigerian Air Force on their locations.
The video showed a masked armed man standing in front of several girls, who, he claimed, were the over 200 girls abducted from their school hostel at Government Secondary School, Chibok, in 2014.
The man said the video was released to send a message to the parents of the girls to beg the Nigerian government to release Boko Haram members in various detention centers in exchange for the girls.
The man said about 40 of the girls were already married while some were dead.
Boko Haram has been blamed for some 20,000 deaths and displacing of more than 2.6 million people since 2009.
