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| Africa Subsaharan | |
| Boko Haram Planning Foreign Kidnaps in NE Nigeria | |
| 2017-05-07 | |
| [An Nahar] Britannia and the United States on Friday said 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... was preparing to kidnap foreigners in remote northeast Nigeria ... a particularly crimson stretch of Islam's bloody border... , which is in the grip of a food crisis caused by the conflict. The Foreign Office in London said it had received reports the Islamist Lions of Islam were "actively planning" to seize foreign workers in the Bama local government area of Borno state. Both said in travel advice that the affected area was "along the Banki-Kumshe axis", which is near the border with Cameroon ...a long, narrow country that fills the space between Nigeria and Chad on the northeast, CAR to the southeast. Prior to incursions by Boko Haram nothing ever happened there... The US embassy in Abuja said in a message to its nationals that the report was "credible". Boko Haram has kidnapped thousands of women and kiddies, including more than 200 schoolgirls from the Borno town of Chibok in 2014, which brought the conflict to world attention. At least 20,000 people have been killed since 2009. But abductions of foreigners have been rare. There was a spate of kidnappings of foreign workers in the wider north from 2011 to 2013, claimed by a Boko Haram splinter group, Ansaru, which was more ideologically aligned to al-Qaeda. The leader of Ansaru, Khalid al-Barnawi, has been charged with the abduction and murder of foreign workers, among them an Italian, a Briton, a German, Greek, Lebanese and Syrians. Most were engineers or construction workers.
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| Posted by:Fred |