Nigeria Says Cease-Fire Signed With Boko Haram

The other parties the government said were involved in the talks, including Boko Haram itself, didn’t confirm that account, and the state has at least twice before announced cease-fires with the militants that didn’t hold. But if true the development would mark a breakthrough after years of death, terror and economic disruption.

Mike Omeri, a spokesman for Nigeria’s government, said the fundamentalist sect is promising to return all of the people it has ever kidnapped, including the girls it abducted from a boarding school in April.

“They also assured us that the schoolgirls and all other people in their captivity are all alive and well,” Mr. Omeri said.

Boko Haram didn’t issue any statement to confirm.

The office of Chadian President Idriss Deby, whom Mr. Omeri said oversaw the talks, declined to confirm the Chadian leader’s involvement, or that there had been a cease-fire.

“There isn’t an official version yet of President Deby’s role in this affair,” said Oumar Yaya Hisseine, a spokesman for the president.

A spokesman for Niger’s president, Mahamadou Issoufou, whom a senior Nigerian security adviser said also played a role in the talks, said in a phone interview that he wasn’t aware of any such dialogue.

Nigeria’s announcement takes place in the context of an increasingly bitter election campaign. President Goodluck Jonathan is set to formally declare his bid for a second term on Saturday. On Wednesday, his rival, ex-military leader Muhammadu Buhari, announced his campaign to unseat Mr. Jonathan in the coming February vote.

Mr. Jonathan’s handling of Boko Haram is a key liability in his re-election effort. Since taking office, Boko Haram’s conflict with the government has left more than 14,000 people dead. Most of Nigeria’s Borno State—which is about the geographic size and population of Ireland—is either abandoned or under Boko Haram control.

The government has repeatedly tried—and failed—to negotiate.

Twice before, in 2012 and 2013, Nigeria’s government announced it had reached a cease-fire with the sect. Both times, Boko Haram attacks continued, with government officials later saying they had been dealing with low-ranking, moderate members who exaggerated their position in the group.

In 2013, a group of northern Nigerian politicians and influential people began sending intermediaries disguised as cowherders to talk with the mother of the group’s leader, Abubakar Shekau, said a senior and a high-ranking northern Nigerian politician, to talk her son out of militancy, said a senior Nigerian politician.

After a few months, Mr. Shekau stopped calling his mother, the security adviser said, marking another failed attempt.

Also last year, the government set up a committee to see if Boko Haram members would surrender in return for job training, psychiatric counseling, and judicial impunity from their participation in the insurgency. The government met with a string of foreign and Nigerian individuals who said they were willing to act as middlemen—for a price.

“Most of those offers, those efforts of intervention of not yielded anything,” said President Jonathan’s spokesman Reuben Abati. “At the end of the day, they collect money and nothing happens.”

Rhoda Bitrus’s daugher Hauwa was among the 219 high school girls kidnapped on the night of April 14. On Friday, she said she was waiting for news on whether her child’s six months in captivity would end.

“I have never stopped praying,” she said.