They’re still stealing children.
Islamist extremist group Boko Haram continues to rampage freely through northeastern Nigeria, blowing up a second strategic bridge, killing an unknown number of villagers and abducting the wife and two children of a retired police officer, residents said Saturday.
News of the ongoing carnage came as a team of French intelligence experts landed in the country, joining American and British teams with hopes of rescuing 276 school girls kidnapped more than three weeks ago by the terrorist group.
Details were murky on the latest child captives, taken Friday as Boko Haram converged on the town of Liman Kara on the Cameroon border, driving 3,000 people from their homes.
Officials and residents said they fled the carnage without having time to count their dead.
Details also remained murky about the latest children to be captured. Boko Haram has said previously that its abductions of family members of Nigerian officials is tit-for-tat retaliation for Nigeria’s detention of the extremists’ own spouses and children.
The group, which seeks to abolish Western-style schools and impose fundamentalist Sharia law on the country, has captured or shot hundreds of schoolchildren in its five-year reign of terror.
Boko Haram abducted another 11 schoolgirls from nearby villages on May 4.
“There is a market for selling humans,” Boko Haram’s leader, Abubakar Shekau, taunted in a video released last week. threatening to sell the 276 girls, who are ages 16 to 18, as sex slaves or child brides.
There is hope the group is actually holding the girls as pawns, to be traded for their own imprisoned soldiers. But experts fear that the longer the girls are captive, the greater the risk they will be separated and dispersed.
No US troops are being used in the Nigeria-led effort; President Goodluck Jonathan agreed to international help only last week, despite immediate offers of assistance from the United States and Britain.
The US contingent consists of some 50 security experts who were already stationed in Nigeria, and a new contingent of seven military experts and State Department officials, which landed Friday.
Meanwhile, hundreds of New Yorkers turned out for a rally outside the Nigerian consulate.
“It has to be clear that any time there is violence against a girl or a woman, that is all of our business, and we will stand against it anywhere in the world,” Mayor Bill de Blasio told the crowd of about 200, which included community and human rights activists and Nigerian immigrants.
“We want the world to know — when you take girls in Nigeria, you take them in New York,” the Rev. Al Sharpton told the crowd.
Sharpton told The Post he is assembling a delegation of city ministers for a possible trip to visit clergy in Nigeria.