First Lady Michelle Obama is to speak out against the kidnapping of more than 200 Nigerian schoolgirls by Islamic militants when she gives the weekly presidential address instead of her husband, the White House said Friday.
White House deputy spokesman Eric Schultz said Michelle Obama would focus on the issue of the mass abductions in an address on Saturday to mark Mother's Day, which falls on Sunday in the United States.
"As the mother of two young daughters, Mrs Obama is taking up the opportunity to express outrage and heartbreak the President and she share over the kidnapping of over 200 Nigerian girls of their school," Schultz told reporters aboard Air Force One.
"The First Lady hopes that the courage of these young girls serves as an inspiration ... and a call to action for people around the world to fight to ensure that every girl receives the education that is their birthright."
The United States said on Thursday it had offered to help Nigeria in its search for around 200 girls abducted by Islamist militants from a school in the northeast of the West African country.
"We have been engaged with the Nigerian government in discussions on what we might do to help support their efforts to find and free these young women," State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf told a daily briefing. "We will continue to have those discussions and help in any way we can."
Gunmen suspected to be from the radical Islamist movement Boko Haram on April 14 stormed an all-girls secondary school in the village of Chibok, in Borno state, packed the teenagers onto trucks and disappeared into a remote area along the border with Cameroon.
The kidnapping occurred the same day a bomb blast, also blamed on Boko Haram, killed 75 people on the edge of the capital, Abuja, and it marked the first attack on the capital in two years.
But the brutality of the school attack has shocked Nigerians long accustomed to hearing about atrocities in an increasingly bloody five-year-old Islamist insurgency in the north. Boko Haram is now seen as the main security threat to Africa's leading energy producer.
