Freed Nigeria women tell of Boko Haram horror
Former hostages held by Boko Haram militants in northern Nigeria say some fellow captives were stoned to death as the army approached to rescue them.
The women said Boko Haram fighters started pelting them when they refused to run away as the army came nearer.
A group of nearly 300 women and children was brought out of the vast Sambisa forest to a government camp.
The military says it has rescued more than 700 people in the past week in an offensive against the Islamist group.
The women said several were killed in the stoning, but they did not know how many. Others were killed inadvertently by the military during the rescue operation, they added.
Soldiers did not realise "in time that we were not the enemies" and some women and children were "run over by their trucks", said survivor Asama Umoru.
The survivors said that when they were initially captured, the militants had killed men and older boys in front of their families before taking women and children into the forest.
Some were forced into marriage.
Other survivors said the militant Islamists never let them out of their sight - not even when they went to the toilet. One woman described how they were fed just one meal a day.
"We were fed only ground dry maize in the afternoons. It was not good for human consumption," Cecilia Abel told Reuters.
"Every day, we witnessed the death of one of us and waited for our turn," said Umaru, a 24-year-old mother of two.
Some of the children were "just little skeletal bodies with flaps of skin that make them look like old people", Associated Press reporter Michelle Faul told the BBC after visiting the camp.
A doctorsaid many severely malnourished babies and children had been put on intravenous drips at a clinic.
The women and children travelled for three days on pick-up trucks from the vast Sambisa forest where they were rescued, to the camp, where they arrived on Saturday night.
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