ONITSHA, Nigeria |
ONITSHA, Nigeria (Reuters) – A Nigerian woman faked her own kidnapping to extort a $ 1,200 ransom from her husband, police said on Tuesday, in a region of the west African nation plagued by abductions.
Authorities arrested the woman and her accomplice, a motorcycle taxi man who helped her stage it, after tracing the bank account given for her husband’s payment of 200,000 naira ($ 1,200) to the taxi man himself.
“They have confessed to the crime and we are corroborating our investigation to be able to charge them in court,” said Ebere Amarizu, a police spokesman in Enugu state.
Kidnapping for ransom is rife in southern Nigeria, particularly in the oil-producing Delta region, in the ethnic Igbo area to the north of it, where Enugu lies, and the commercial hub of Lagos.
In some cases, police suspect the victims collude with their abductors.
The multi-million dollar criminal enterprise pushes up the insurance and security costs for businesses, including foreign oil majors who have often been targeted in the past. ($ 1 = 160.1 naira)
(Reporting by Anamesere Igboeroteonwu; Writing by Tim Cocks, Editing by Gareth Jones)
The Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram is suspected in a terrorist attack at a rural college that killed at least 50 students – many of them murdered while sleeping.
Suspected Islamist militants stormed a college in northeastern Nigeria and shot dead around 40 male students, some of them while they slept early on Sunday, witnesses said.
State police commissioner Sanusi Rufai said he suspected Boko Haram was behind the attack but gave no details.
The bodies were brought from the college, which is in Gujba, a rural area 30 miles (50km) south of Damaturu and around 130 miles from Nigerian borders with Cameroon and Niger.
The gunmen, thought to be members of rebel sect Boko Haram, attacked one hostel, took some students outside before killing them and shot others trying to flee, people at the scene told Reuters.
“They started gathering students into groups outside, then they opened fire and killed one group and then moved onto the next group and killed them. It was so terrible,” said one surviving student Idris, who would only give his first name.
“They came with guns around 1 a.m. (2400 GMT) and went directly to the male hostel and opened fire on them … The college is in the bush so the other students were running around helplessly as guns went off and some of them were shot down,” said Ahmed Gujunba, a taxi driver who lives by the college.
Boko Haram, which wants to establish an Islamic state in northern Nigeria, has intensified attacks on civilians in recent weeks in revenge for a military offensive against its insurgency.
Several schools, seen as the focus of Western-style education and culture, have been targeted.
Boko Haram and spin-off Islamist groups like the al Qaeda-linked Ansaru have become the biggest security threat in Africa’s second largest economy and top oil exporter.
Western governments are increasingly worried about the threat posed by Islamist groups across Africa, from Mali and Algeria in the Sahara, to Kenya in the east, where Somalia’s al-Shabaab fighters killed at least 67 people in an attack on a Nairobi shopping mall a week ago.
Bodies were recovered from dormitories, classrooms and outside in the undergrowth on Sunday, a member of staff at the college told Reuters, asking not to be named.
A Reuters witness counted 40 bloody corpses piled on the floor at the main hospital in Yobe state capital Damaturu on Sunday, mostly of young men believed to be students.
Is the rise of al-Shabab and Boko Haram attributable to our emphasis on core al-Qaeda groups in Pakistan and Iraq? Some analysts think that we could have assisted the Kenyans and Nigerians with tamping down these groups before they became as well armed and numerous as they are today if we had looked at Islamist terrorism as a global problem rather than a concentrating on major al-Qaeda affiliates in a few countries.
For the moment, the African terrorist groups appear content to murder people close to home. But as they grow, they may become more ambitious and begin to threaten American interests directly. Assisting African states in dealing with these groups should be on the front burner of our foreign policy agenda.
MAIDUGURI |
MAIDUGURI (Reuters) – The death toll from an Islamist militant assault on travellers along a road in northeast Nigeria has risen to 143, an official from the local branch of the Environmental Protection Agency said on Friday.
In the attack on Tuesday, Boko Haram militants wearing military uniforms stopped traffic on a highway between the cities of Maiduguri and Damaturu, dragging people out of their vehicles and killing them, witnesses and security sources said. The initial toll was given as more than 20.
“We have been picking corpses off the roadsides all day, there are more in the bush, they are all travellers shot at or slaughtered by Boko Haram gunmen who attacked on Tuesday night. We have so far picked up 143 corpses,” the official, Abdulazeez Kolomi, said.
(CNN) — The Nigerian military said Thursday it killed one of the leaders of the Islamist extremist group, Boko Haram, which has waged an insurgency in the nation for years.
Mamadu Bama, also known as Abu Saad, was killed along with his father this month in Borno state, the military said in a statement.
He was the group’s second-in-command while his father was its spiritual mentor, the military said.
The militant group has not released any statement on the deaths.
Boko Haram has attacked various targets in the nation since 2009, murdering and kidnapping Westerners, and bombing schools and churches.
It is suspected to be behind a gruesome mosque killing this week. In that attack Sunday, militants brandishing automatic weapons killed 44 worshipers in the country’s troubled Borno state. Around the time of the attack, the group released a video boasting that it was growing stronger.
Boko Haram translates loosely as “western education is forbidden/sinful.” It holds all government authority in contempt and wants to establish a state in northern Nigeria under Islamic law.
Human rights groups have accused the Nigerian military of extrajudicial killings in its fight against the militant group.
“Soldiers have allegedly burned homes and executed Boko Haram suspects or residents with no apparent links to the group,” Human Rights Watch said in a report this year. “Nigerian authorities have rarely brought anyone to justice for these crimes.”
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