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| Africa Subsaharan |
| Boko Haram Leader Dismisses Claims of his Death in New Video |
| 2014-10-03 |
| Boko Haram ... not to be confused with Procol Harum, Harum Scarum, possibly to be confused with Helter Skelter. The Nigerian version of al-Qaeda and the Taliban rolled together and flavored with a smigeon of distinctly Subsaharan ignorance and brutality... leader Abubakar Shekau dismissed Nigerian military claims of his death in a new video obtained by AFP on Thursday and said the "Here I am, alive. I will only die the day Allah takes my breath," Shekau said, adding that his group was "running our... Islamic caliphate" and administering strict sharia punishments. Boko Haram has shown images of extreme violence before but the latest video shows at length graphic scenes of an amputation and a stoning to death as well as a beheading. It also purports to show the wreckage of a Nigerian Air Force jet that went missing in the northeast on September 11. Boko Haram said its fighters shot it down but the military denied the claim. The military announced last week that Shekau was dead and that a man who had been posing as the group's leader in the videos had been killed after fighting with troops in the far northeast. Security analysts and the United States questioned the credibility of the military's claim. The new 36-minute video shows Shekau, in combat fatigues and black rubber boots, standing on the back of a pick-up truck and firing an anti-aircraft gun into the air. Standing in front of three camouflaged vans and flanked by four heavily armed, masked fighters, he then speaks for 16 minutes in Arabic and the Hausa language widely spoken in northern Nigeria. There was no indication of where or when the video was shot. Shekau appears in separate images from the violence. The heavily bearded Shekau, who appeared to be the same man as those in previous clips, said the military's claim that he was dead was propaganda. "Nothing will kill me until my days are over... I'm still alive. Some people asked you if Shekau has two souls. No, I have one soul, by Allah," he said, apparently reading from a script. "It is propaganda that is prevalent. I have one soul. I'm an Islamic student. "I'm the Islamic student whose seminary you burnt... I'm not dead," he added, apparently referring to the destruction of the group's mosque in the Borno state capital, Maiduguri, in 2009. |
| Posted by:trailing wife |