MAIDUGURI, Nigeria — Days after Nigeria’s military raised hopes with the announcement that Islamic extremists had agreed to a cease-fire, Boko Haram is still fighting and there is no word on the fate of the 219 schoolgirls held hostage for six months.

Officials had said talks would resume in neighboring Chad this week, but there was no confirmation that those negotiations had resumed by Wednesday.

The official silence raises many questions, especially since Boko Haram’s leader Abubakar Shekau has not confirmed that a truce has been agreed.

Relatives of the girls abducted from a boarding school in northeastern Chibok said they are confused but trying to be hopeful.

“Things are still sketchy with lots of holes and varying statements,” Allen Manasseh, a brother of one of the missing schoolgirls, told The Associated Press by telephone.

Nigeria’s Foreign Minister Aminu Wali on Tuesday said “I can say with some optimism, cautious optimism, that were are moving toward a situation where we’d be able to, in the very near future, to be able to get back our girls.”

Despite the cease-fire announced by the military on Friday, the Islamic insurgents have attacked two villages and a town in the northeast and raised their flag in a fourth village.

People who escaped this week from Bama, a town in a part of northeastern Nigeria where Boko Haram has declared an Islamic caliphate, say hundreds of residents are being detained for allegedly breaking the group’s strict version of Shariah law.

Residents who got out of Bama said so many people have been detained by Boko Haram that the jail is overcrowded and houses are being used as makeshift prisons. Many young men have been forced to join Boko Haram, and those who refuse are killed, said those who ran away.


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