Nigeria’s presidency said on Monday it plans to negotiate for the release of 110 girls abducted from a school in the northeastern town of Dapchi last month, rather than use a military operation to free them by force.

The kidnapping is one of the largest since the jihadist group Boko Haram abducted more than 270 schoolgirls from the northeastern town of Chibok in 2014. Some of the Chibok girls have been freed after what security sources say were ransom payments; around 100 are still being held.

Nigeria is grappling with an insurgency by Boko Haram that has killed at least 20,000 people since 2009. Members of the group are suspected of the latest kidnapping, which happened on Feb. 19, in the state of Yobe.

President Muhammadu Buhari, a 75-year-old former military ruler, discussed the use of negotiations during a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in the capital, Abuja, the presidency said.

“Nigeria prefers to have schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram from Chibok and Dapchi back alive, and that is why it has chosen negotiation, rather than a military option,” Buhari’s office said in an emailed statement issued by the president’s spokesman.

“President Buhari added that Nigeria was working together with international organisations and negotiators, to ensure that the girls were released unharmed by their captors,” the presidency statement said.

The issue of security has become politically charged in Nigeria less than a year before a presidential election. Buhari is touring areas hit by security problems and this week will visit the state where the schoolgirls were abducted, the statement said.

Tillerson was in Nigeria for the last stop in a week-long tour of African countries, his first trip to the continent as Secretary of State, during which he has emphasised security partnerships. He visited Ethiopia, Kenya, Djibouti and Chad before arriving in Nigeria’s capital.

The emailed statement also said Buhari thanked the U.S. for assistance rendered in the fight against Boko Haram, noting that Nigerian forces are good but need assistance with training and equipment.

REUTERS

Nigeria Customs earlier this month arrested man who attempted to travel with $375,000 cash to the United Arab Emirates. They have since handed the suspect over to the anti-graft body.

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) on Wednesday confirmed that Customs had handed over one Adamu Rabiu Mohammed to them for investigations.

Adamu was arrested at the Kaduna International airport with the money as he was due to board an Ethiopian Airlines flight bound for Dubai.

Head of the EFCC office in Kaduna said they will do all it takes to get to the bottom of the attempted act. He added that the suspect will be processed for court as soon as their preliminary investigations are done.

The EFCC has in the past seized huge sums of foreign currency across the country. In February 2017, they announced the seizure of $9.8 m cash in a Kuduna house, the money is said to be owned by a former head of the country’s oil firm, NNPC.

They have also busted over $600,000 in a Lagos market and another $43 million cash in a Lagos apartment. The latter known as the ‘Ikoyi cash’ led to the dismissal of the country’s spy chief by President Muhammadu Buhari after a probe.

Source: Africa News

Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari will visit Yobe, the northeastern state where 110 schoolgirls were abducted by suspected members of Islamist militant group Boko Haram last month, the presidency said on its official Twitter feed on Monday.

The presidency said Buhari would visit areas affected by criminality in the last few weeks to meet and console communities affected from Mar. 5. It said he will visit Yobe, Taraba, Benue and Rivers States.The tweet did not say whether he would visit the town of Dapchi, where the girls were taken on Feb. 19.

It however mentioned that he had received the Liberian president, George Weah, before starting the regional tour in Taraba state. Buhari is later expected to travel to Ghana for the country’s 61st independence celebrations.

Buhari urged Nigerians to cooperate with security agencies in order to arrest the latest wave of crime and atrocities by Boko Haram.

Source: Africa News

At least 10 people were killed in several days of violence between herdsmen and farmers in eastern Nigeria, police said on Monday, but the cattle drivers gave a higher toll.

Clashes broke out in a number of remote herding villages in the Mambilla district of Taraba state last Thursday and continued throughout the weekend.

The violence is part of a wider series of clashes between largely nomadic cattle herders and farmers in central and southern Nigeria that has put pressure on the government to act.

“So far we have established the deaths of 10 people in the violence between herders and farmers in the Mambilla area,” said state police spokesman David Misal.

“Security personnel have succeeded in restoring normalcy in the area and there is ongoing security operation to consolidate peace.”

According to herders, Mambilla militia armed with machetes and spears stormed five herding settlements of Nyiwa, Yerimaru, Wuro-Mogoggo, Leme and Gagarum between Thursday and Saturday.

“From our records, 19 people have been killed and 23 injured in the unprovoked attacks in these five villages by armed Mambilla tribe militia,” said the head of the Nigerian herders union MACBAN, Mohammed Keruwa.

Nyiwa was worst hit with nine herders killed by the attackers who also “killed 318 cows, stole 38 cows, 158 sheep and 308 fowls,” he added.

Mambilla lies on Nigeria’s border with Cameroon and is a herding and farming hub reputed for fertile land, lush vegetation and abundant water.

Tensions have been running high for many years between herders and farmers over land and water rights.

The herders are Muslim and the farmers are largely Christian, which adds an ethnic and religious dimension to the tensions. Many herders have fled to northern Cameroon.

In January 2002, more than 20,000 herders fled the Mambilla plateau area into Cameroon following violence with farmers which MACBAN said at the time left 50 herders dead.

In June last year deadly clashes again broke out in the area. MACBAN claimed more than 700 herders were killed in the violence but the authorities gave a much lower toll.

The southern state of Benue has been a flashpoint in recent months after resistance to a new law banning open grazing for cattle.

In January, 73 people from the ethnic Tiv farming communities were buried at a mass funeral after a series of attacks blamed on Fulani herders.

(Source: AFP)

When President Muhammadu Buhari took office three years ago, eradicating Boko Haram militants and rescuing the hundreds of women and children they held captive was one of the main pledges in his inaugural address.

Another mass abduction of schoolgirls in the town of Dapchi has exposed how little progress has been made. It also shows that security is a major weakness for the former military ruler with less than a year to go before elections.

“The government is not doing sufficiently well as it relates to security because if they are, an experience like that of Chibok that happened four years ago, we had four years to prevent the recurrence of Chibok. Yet four years after we still have Dapchi, and not just that one or two girls or five girls, over a hundred girls were taken in one night.” Bukky Shonibare, a member of the Bring Back Our Girls Group

The kidnap of the 110 girls, mostly aged 11-19, almost two weeks ago bears similarities to Boko Haram’s 2014 abduction of more than 270 schoolgirls from Chibok.

“I voted for Buhari for change, but sincerely right now, the way things are, we are going backward and not forward. Before I used to come out in confidence, but now I come out in shame. If we find good change, I want Buhari but with the way things are, if it continues like this, I will not vote for Buhari.” Idris Mohammed, a generator repairer.

Buhari has declared the Dapchi abduction a “national disaster”.

Source: Reuters

Nigeria has confirmed another mass kidnapping of schoolgirls in the militancy-riddled northeast, saying it has deployed extra troops and planes to search for over 100 girls, who remain missing following a Boko Haram raid on their school last week.

Militants on February 19 drove into the town of Dapchi in northeastern Yobe State in trucks and attacked the school, causing students and teachers to flee into the surrounding bush.

It is not known how the girls were abducted, but witnesses say some of the attackers were camouflaged, making the students mistake them for army soldiers.

Government and police officials have been giving contradictory figures of those missing, with estimates ranging from 50 to 100.

The Yobe State government also added to the confusion on Wednesday, when it said dozens of the abducted girls had been rescued, prompting many locals, including the parents of the missing girls, in Dapchi to celebrate.

The next day, however, the local administration apologized for the “erroneous” statement, which it said had been based on inaccurate information.

Finally, the Nigerian Information Ministry on Sunday put an end to confusion and acknowledged that 110 girls are missing in a statement based on numbers obtained from parents who said their girls had not returned home since the school raid.

“The federal government has confirmed that 110 students of the Government Science and Technical College in Dapchi, Yobe State, are so far unaccounted for, after insurgents believed to be from a faction of Boko Haram invaded their school on Monday,” the statement said.

The statement said 906 students were in the school on the day of the attack.

Information Minister Lai Mohammed said additional security officials have been deployed to schools in the state.

The Nigerian Air Force also said the chief of air staff had “directed the immediate deployment of additional air assets and Nigerian Air Force personnel to the northeast with the sole mission of conducting day and night searches for the missing girls” in coordination with the ground forces.

The latest kidnappings have revived the painful memories of another mass abduction in April 2014, when Boko Haram militants attacked a girl school and kidnapped 294 girls in Chibok, Borno State. Many of the girls were released after negotiations, but more than 100 remain in captivity, their whereabouts unknown.

There has been growing anger among locals over the government’s handling of the recent incident as well as reports that soldiers had been withdrawn from key checkpoints in Dapchi last month.

The Nigerian government has claimed in the past that Boko Haram was defeated, but the Takfiri outfit continues to vex especially in the country’s restive northeast.

The Takfiri Boko Haram militant group has killed more than 20,000 people and forced two million to flee their homes since the onset of its terror campaign in 2009. It pledged allegiance Daesh in 2015.

Source: Presstv

The Nigerian military has managed to rescue 76 schoolgirls and recovered the bodies of two others out of an estimated 90 girls who had gone missing following an attack by the Takfiri Boko Haram militant group on a school in the country’s northeast.

“Everybody is celebrating their coming with songs and praises to God almighty,” said Babagana Umar, a parent whose daughter had disappeared, on Wednesday. “The only sad news is that two girls were dead and no explanation.”

According to Umar and other residents of the small town of Dapchi in the state of Yobe, where a school was raided by the terror outfit on Monday evening, at least 13 other students may still be missing.

According to eyewitnesses, the Boko Haram militants descended on Dapchi in trucks, some with heavy guns mounted on them and painted in military camouflage. They then went straight to the Girls Science Secondary School and began shooting sporadically, forcing panicked students and teachers to flee.

There are conflicting reports about how exactly the girls went missing. Police and state officials said that 815 of the school’s 926 students had later returned to the school after fleeing into the bush outside the town during the attack.

Police and state officials said that there had been no evidence that the missing girls had been kidnapped by Boko Haram, suggesting that the rescued ones had been recovered from their hiding places.

However, the Yobe government later said in a statement that the military had rescued some of the students from the grips of the terror group.

Separately, Information Minister Lai Mohammed said Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari had on Wednesday dispatched his foreign and defense ministers to Yobe to investigate the incident.

Since 2009, the Boko Haram militancy has left at least 20,000 dead and made over 2.6 million others homeless.

Back in 2014, the Takfiri terrorist group kidnapped more than 270 schoolgirls from the town of Chibok in Borno State. The mass abduction triggered global condemnation and intense criticism of Nigerian officials in the country. An international campaign dubbed “Bring Back Our Girls” was also launched.

Of the 276 students originally abducted, nearly 60 escaped soon after the incident and some others have since been released after mediation. Some 100 are still believed to remain in captivity.

Last month, the terror outfit released a video allegedly showing some of the Chibok girls still in its custody, saying they do not wish to return home.

Source: Presstv

A total of 111 schoolgirls are missing after Boko Haram Takfiri militants attacked Dapchi village in northeast Nigeria, police say.

“Eight hundred and fifteen students returned to the school and were visibly seen, out of 926 in the school,” the police minister of Yobe state, Abdulmaliki Sumonu, told reporters on Wednesday. “The rest are missing. No case of abduction has so far been established.”
Earlier in the day, two sources said that a roll-call at the girls’ school in the village on Tuesday showed that 91 students were absent.

“I saw girls crying and wailing in three Tata vehicles and they were crying for help,” a witness from the nearby village of Gumsa, who was reportedly forced to show the terrorists the way out of the area and then released, told Reuters.

Meanwhile, seven parents said their daughters were among the missing.

“I hope my daughter is not one of those abducted as we learned that over ninety of them were not seen after going through their register book,” one parent said.

The two sources, several parents and other local witnesses spoke on condition of anonymity as Nigerian security and government officials warned them not to disclose the disappearance.

Eyewitnesses said on Monday that a convoy of pickup trucks belonging to Boko Haram descended on Dapchi in the Bursari area of Yobe state around 6 p.m. (1700 GMT). The militants went directly to the Girls Science Secondary School, and began shooting sporadically, forcing students and teachers to flee, according to the witnesses.

Since 2009, the Boko Haram militancy has left at least 20,000 dead and made over 2.6 million others homeless.

If confirmed, the girls’ disappearance would be one of the largest since the Takfiri terrorist group kidnapped more than 270 schoolgirls from the town of Chibok in 2014. The mass kidnapping triggered global condemnation and intense criticism of Nigerian officials in the country as well as an international “Bring Back Our Girls” campaign.

Of the 276 originally abducted students, nearly 60 escaped soon after the incident and others have since been released after mediation. Some 100 are still believed to remain in captivity.

Source: Presstv

Takfiri Boko Haram militants have attacked a village in northeast Nigeria, unsuccessfully attempting to kidnap girls at a boarding school there.

Eyewitnesses said on Monday that a convoy of pickup trucks belonging to Boko Haram militants descended on Dapchi Village in the Bursari area of Yobe State around 6 pm (1700 GMT).

“When they stormed the village, they began shooting and setting off explosives,” said resident Sheriff Aisami. “This drew the attention of the girls in the Girls Science Secondary School, so the girls and the teachers were able to escape before the attackers got into the school.”

Unable to kidnap the girls, the Boko Haram fighters looted the school before fleeing.

It was not clear whether the violence caused any casualties.

“Obviously, the attack was meant to abduct school girls, but luckily they found none of the girls as they were taken away by teachers before they (the militants) arrived,” said a member of a local civilian militia battling the extremists.

Boko Haram notoriously kidnapped more than 200 schoolgirls from the town of Chibok in April 2014.

Separately, Nigeria’s Justice Ministry announced on Monday that more than 200 people have been convicted in Nigeria on charges related involvement with Boko Haram.

The convictions of 205 people in mass trials marked the conclusion of the second stage of the country’s biggest legal action against Boko Haram, which began a militancy in 2009 aimed at toppling the government.

“Most of them were convicted for professing to belong to the terrorist group, (or) concealing information about the group which they knew or [were] believe[d] to be of material assistance that could lead to the arrest, prosecution or conviction of Boko Haram members,” the Justice Ministry said in a statement.

Jail terms ranged from three to 60 years, said the ministry.

It also said a total of 526 people allegedly affiliated with Boko Haram had been released for rehabilitation during the second stage, and said 73 cases had been adjourned.

Since 2009, the Boko Haram militancy has left at least 20,000 dead and made over 2.6 million others homeless.

Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, a former general, came to power in 2015 on a platform of stamping out the Boko Haram militancy. But despite retaking swathes of territory from the group, it continues to stage attacks targeting both civilians and military targets.

Source: Presstv

Some 19 people have been killed and dozens more wounded when three bombers blew themselves up in Nigeria’s northeastern Borno State, the hardest hit by Daesh-inspired Boko Haram militancy.

Damian Chukwu, police commissioner for Borno State, said on Saturday that the explosions occurred at a fish market about 20 kilometers (12 miles) from the center of Maiduguri on Friday evening.

Babakura Kolo and Musa Ari, from the Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF) assisting Nigeria’s military against Takfiri militants, also said the bombers were all men.

“We have 19 dead and about 70 others injured… Two of the bombers attacked the Tashan Kifi fish market. Then four minutes later, a third bomber struck nearby,” said Kolo.

“The victims included 18 civilians and one soldier. The Tashan Kifi is an informal market which serves as an eatery, market and also hang-out for residents,” the official added.

Kolo further said 22 out of the 70 injured are in critical condition, blaming the attack on the Boko Haram militant group.

“There is no question as to who did it: Boko Haram has targeted Konduga several times,” he said.

More than 20,000 people have been killed since Boko Haram started its deadly campaign in northeast Nigeria in 2009. The violence has claimed many lives in neighboring countries of Chad, Niger and Cameroon as well.

Boko Haram, which pledged allegiance to the Daesh Takfiri group in 2015, has been largely pushed out of its main strongholds in northern Nigeria, according to the country’s military and government.

The group, however, is still active in its Sambisa Forest enclave in Borno and launches sporadic attacks on civilians and security forces from there. The United Nations has warned that areas affected by Boko Haram face a humanitarian crisis.

Source: Presstv