Quoting the UK Observer, The Guardian said that British armed forces offered to attempt to set free the nearly 300 girls but were "rebuffed" by Jonathan, the west African country's leader at the time.

The girls were kidnapped by the Boko Haram insurgents from a boarding school in the remote northeastern town of Chibok in April 2014. A significant number of them still remained in captivity after some of them were released last year.

The British forces reportedly detected the Boko Haram kidnappers just a few weeks after the girls were abducted, but action was refused.

"The girls were located in the first few weeks of the RAF mission... We offered to rescue them, but the Nigerian government declined," a source involved in Operation Turus was quoted as saying.

A report on Monday by Nigeria's Daily Trust said that Jonathan had since dismissed the report as "false", saying that he never "snubbed" the British forces’ offer.

"We can confidently say the lies in this report are self-evident," Jonathan’s spokesperson, Ikechukwu Eze, said in a statement.

"We are, however, not surprised that this kind of concocted story is coming out at this point in time, as it appears that some people who have obviously been playing politics with the issue of the Chibok girls will stop at nothing to further their interest."

The BBC said that a spokesperson for the present administration maintained that the Observer's report confirmed their claim that Jonathan had been "playing politics" with the Boko Haram insurgency.

-News24.com