The leader of Boko Haram vowed to sell hundreds of schoolgirls that were kidnapped in the north of the country two weeks ago, Agence France Press reports on Monday.

Abubakar Shekau, the infamous head of the Nigerian Islamist militant group, made the comments in a taped video message in which he also claimed responsibility for the mass abduction.

“I abducted your girls. I will sell them in the market, by Allah,” a man claiming to be Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau said in a video first obtained by Agence France-Presse.

“There is a market for selling humans. Allah says I should sell. He commands me to sell. I will marry off a woman at the age of 12. I will marry off a girl at the age of nine. I will sell women. I sell women,” he continued, according to a translation from the Hausa language.

“Girls, you should go and get married,” he said.

The outrageous threat means the girls’ parents’ worst fears could be realized. Parents have avoided speaking to the media for fear their daughters may be singled out for reprisals.

U.S. State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said the video “does appear legitimate.”

The tape won’t intimidate or deter Nigeria from efforts to save the kidnapped girls, the Nigerian government said.

“It is disheartening that someone would make such a terrible boast,” Doyin Okupe, spokesman for President Goodluck Jonathan, said in an interview with CNN.

“It is to be expected of terrorists,” he added. “No group can affect our resolve. We will see this through to the end. We have the commitment and capacity to get this done. No matter what this takes, we will get these girls.”

On Sunday, Jonathan vowed, “Wherever these girls are, we’ll get them out.”

But he also criticized the girls’ parents, saying they weren’t cooperating fully with police.

“What we request is maximum cooperation from the guardians and the parents of these girls. Because up to this time, they have not been able to come clearly, to give the police clear identity of the girls that have yet to return,” he said.

Armed militants abducted more than 300 Nigerian girls from their secondary school in Borno state on April 14, driving them off into the remote Sambisa forest. While some managed to escape, police said last week that 276 were still missing.

Civic organizations had warned earlier that the young women were being forced to marry extremists for as little as $12 and had been trafficked across the borders with neighboring Chad and Cameroon.

Ap, in its report, stated that an intermediary, who said that Boko Haram was ready to negotiate ransoms for the girls, revealed that two of the girls had died of snake bites and about 20 ill.

The news agency also stated that Christians among the girls had been forced to convert to Islam, the source further revealed.

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