At least 20 loggers have been killed in northeast Nigeria after Boko Haram Takfiri terrorists opened fire on them in the militants’ latest attack against civilians.

Residents and anti-Boko Haram militia said on Friday that gunmen on motorbikes opened fire on a group of loggers while they were collecting firewood at Kaje village, near the capital of Borno State, Maiduguri, on Monday.

“They (Boko Haram) killed 20 people in the attack. Fifteen others are missing and presumed kidnapped by the attackers,” said civilian militia leader Ibrahim Liman.

Details of the attack have been slow to emerge because of limited communications infrastructure after years of fighting in the remote region.

Shuaibu Sidi, a resident of Kaje, confirmed Liman’s account and said his brother was among the victims.

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 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.

Liman said they believe that the perpetrators of the Monday’s attack are “the same gunmen” behind the murder of 25 loggers at Maiwa village, which is three kilometers (nearly two miles) from Kaje, back on December 30.

He noted that the assailants were believed to have come from the terrorist group’s main enclave in the Sambisa Forest area.

Loggers have been increasingly targeted by Boko Haram, which accuses them of spying for the military and the civilian militia, which assists troops with security.

At least 31 loggers have gone missing since January 2 and are believed to have been kidnapped near the town of Gamboru, on the border with Cameroon.

Source: Presstv

Nigeria has started evacuating thousands of its citizens trapped in Libya amid reports of rampant abuses against Europe-bound refugees in the North African state.

Nigerian Foreign Minister Geoffrey Onyeama told reporters during a visit to Tripoli on Saturday that he expected an estimated 5,500 Nigerian citizens to be repatriated as part of the process, but noted that the situation on the ground made it hard to ascertain the exact number.

“Our president has made available all the resources necessary to repatriate all the Nigerians here,” said Onyeama, adding that two planes had been assigned for the task.

Thousands of Nigerians have been stuck in Libya after failing to make the perilous journey across the Mediterranean Sea to Europe.

According to a report by Al Jazeera, Nigerians in Libya have conveyed horrific accounts of abuses ranging from imprisonment and torture to slavery and rape.

Citizens of Nigeria make the largest national group among African refugees traveling to Libya in the hope of crossing from there to Italy by sea en the route to other European states.

Around 500 Nigerians were brought in by the government in the first round of the evacuation process over the weekend.

“They talked about various abuses – systematic, endemic, and exploitation of all kinds,” said Onyeama. “There were obviously interests that wanted to keep as many of them there as possible because they were commodities.”

In November 2017, the CNN aired footage, showing live auctions in Libya where black youths were being sold for hundreds of dollars to buyers as farmhands.

The footage drew global outrage, with UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres saying the reported auctions of refugees as slaves amount to “crimes against humanity” and calling for an immediate investigation into the matter.

Several protests were also held in European cities to condemn the slave markets, with the participants blaming the European Union’s support for a 2011 NATO military intervention in Libya for the current chaotic situation in the African country.

Libya has faced a power vacuum since the NATO military intervention resulted in the downfall of its longtime dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. Since then, the country has been grappling with chaos and the emergence of numerous militant groups, including the Takfiri Daesh terror group.

The UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM) said 171,635 asylum seekers entered Europe by sea during 2017.  Italy, Greece, Cyprus and Spain were the main destinations, with nearly 70 percent arriving in Italy.

Source: Presstv

Nigeria’s military has announced in a statement that its soldiers have rescued one of the 270 schoolgirls kidnapped in 2014 by Daesh-linked Boko Haram terrorist group from the town of Chibok.

The statement declared on Thursday that Salomi Pagu was discovered by troops deployed in the town of Pulka along with another girl and a small child, noting that the second girl was not among the Chibok pupils abducted by the notorious terror group.

“They…are in the safe custody of troops and receiving medical attention,” said the military statement without elaborating on the circumstance of their rescue.

The mass kidnapping of more than 270 female students 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. Some 100 are still believed to remain in captivity.

This is while the Takfiri terror group released 82 of the young girls last May following a swap deal involving a ransom payment to the terrorists and the release of a number of the group’s imprisoned senior members. Prior to that, 24 of the kidnapped girls had been freed or found in 2016.

While the mass abduction in Chibok attracted international attention, aid groups insist that Boko Haram has kidnapped thousands more adults and children, whose fate have largely been neglected by local authorities.

The development came amid earlier reports that at least 31 loggers were believed to have been abducted by Boko Haram militants after they went missing in northeast Nigeria.

Security sources were cited as saying on Wednesday that the alleged kidnapping took place just days after 30 troops vanished following a raid on a military base in the same area.

Boko Haram fighters still operate in hard-to-reach rural areas where military operations are minimal.

Boko Haram’s eight-year insurgency against the Nigerian government has further spilled into neighboring Niger, Chad and Cameroon, leaving nearly 20,000 people dead and displacing over 2.6 million more.

Most of the displaced rely on food handouts from aid agencies while others have turned to logging in the arid region for firewood which they sell to purchase food.

The Takfiri terrorists have increasingly targeted loggers in their armed campaign, accusing them of spying and relaying information to the military and the local militia battling them.

On Christmas Day, the militants killed 25 loggers at a logging site outside the city of Maiduguri.

Source: Presstv

A leader of the militant group Boko Haram has released a video claiming it carried out a series of attacks in north-east Nigeria over the Christmas period.

Abubakar Shekau, the head of one of Boko Haram’s three factions, declared the group active and operational a day after the Nigerian president said the militants had been defeated.

“We are in good health and nothing has happened to us,” he said in the video released on Tuesday. “Nigerian troops, police and those creating mischief against us can’t do anything against us, and you will gain nothing.

“We carried out the attacks in Maiduguri, in Gamboru, in Damboa. We carried out all these attacks.”

There has been a surge in violence in recent months, with dozens of people killed in suicide bombings and attacks on military bases in the region. Authorities have put this down to desperate insurgents trying to find food, weapons and ammunition.

Three people were reportedly burned to death on Christmas Day in Molai, a village near Maiduguri, the birthplace of Boko Haram. On Saturday 25 loggers were killed 13 miles from the state capital.

It is unclear to which Gamboru attack Shekau was referring, but he may have meant an ambush of an aid convoy on the Gamboru road in which four people were killed.

His declaration that the self-styled Islamists are alive and well contradicted the Nigerian president’s new year message which was broadcast the day before.

“We have since beaten Boko Haram,” said Muhammadu Buhari. “Isolated attacks still occur, but even the best-policed countries cannot prevent determined criminals from committing terrible acts of terror.”

In mid-December the government announced it was releasing $1bn from its excess oil account to pay for military equipment and training to fight the insurgency. Later it said not all the money would be spent on fighting Boko Haram alone.

Nigeria has recently announced a plan to combat Boko Haram by making villagers living in insecure areas move to garrison towns – although this was in effect how the military operated for most of 2017.

It is unclear how villagers who have always made their living farming, herding and fishing will be expected to survive when they are living on lands not their own and are not permitted to leave.

It is impossible to build up a clear picture of what exactly is happening in north-east Nigeria and across its borders in Cameroon and Chad.

According to a security tracker set up by the Council on Foreign Relations to monitor deaths reported in the media, more than 30,000 people have died in the conflict since May 2011. There are thought to have been large numbers of unreported deaths in inaccessible regions.

For the past two years, the Nigerian government has insisted it is winning or has won the war. According to the Nigerian army’s latest pronouncement, 700 Boko Haram captives recently escaped to Monguno, one of the local government areas of Borno state, after military operations in the region.

Pouring scorn on declarations of his death or capture, Shekau periodically releases video messages aimed at the government, the Nigerian people or a global audience. In the most notorious of these, he paraded the Chibok girls, a group of 300 schoolgirls kidnapped by his men, and vowed he would “sell them in the market”.

Culled from The Guardian

At least 5,247 Muslims have been killed in the Boko Haram insurgency across the northeastern Adamawa state of Nigeria over the past four years, a group says.

The Adamawa State chapter of Muslim Council, which comprises several Islamic organizations, said in a report on Sunday that more than 5,100 Muslims were also injured across seven local government areas of the state since 2013.

The affected local governments are Madagali, Michika, Maiha, Mubi North, Mubi South, Hong and Gombi. The report said Madagali Local Government Area had the highest number of dead victims with 2,500 people while Hong had the least with 68.

The report, which was presented to the Adamawa governor, Alhaji Muhammadu Bindow also said over 12,700 properties, including houses, mosques, livestock and farm produce worth $220 million had been destroyed in the state.

The report also called for more support for victims and reconstruction of places of worship and schools. In addition, it recommends increasing security and financial support to local defense groups assisting the military in the fight against the Takfiri Boko Haram terrorist group.

Adamawa is one of the three states most affected by Boko Haram. The others are Borno and Yobe states.

Boko Haram has led an insurgency in Nigeria and neighboring countries that has left around 20,000 people dead. Hundreds of thousands have also been displaced in the violence.

Boko Haram has claimed responsibility for numerous deadly terror attacks in Nigeria during the past eight years. The attacks have so far claimed the lives of at least 20,000 people and displaced more than 2.7 million others.

The United Nations has warned that areas affected by Boko Haram face a humanitarian crisis.

Some 100,000 Nigerians made homeless by Boko Haram received formal identification papers on Wednesday, to help boost security and restore normality in the country’s restive northeast.

The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHRC) began documenting personal details of the displaced at the Dalori camp, just outside the Borno state capital, Maiduguri.

Dangana Ibrahim, from the agency, told AFP: “We are capturing their data and issuing them with temporary ID pending the production of the ID card in the next week.”

At least 20,000 people have been killed and more than 2.6 million displaced in the eight-year conflict, which has destroyed livelihoods and triggered a humanitarian crisis.

About 1.8 million people live in camps or with relatives in the worst-affected states of Borno, Yobe and Adamawa. Others have fled to Niger, Chad and Cameroon.

According to the UNHCR, 99 percent of vulnerable IDP (internally displaced people) households in Borno state lack legal documentation.

Even before the insurgency began, levels of registration and documentation were low, and were compounded by lack of literacy. When fighting broke out, civilians were at risk.

Ibrahim said a female IDP had been shot as a soldier mistook her for a suicide bomber, as she could not produce any identification.

In May, UNHCR regional representative for West Africa, Liz Ahua, said more than 200,000 Nigerian refugees in Niger, Chad and Cameroon also lacked “adequate documentation”.

That made their “access to protection and rights” more difficult, she added. “The link between issues of statelessness, sustaining peace and security in the region cannot be separated as statelessness can lead to insecurity and instability.

“Stateless persons could easily be used as tools of destruction.” Borno state is being given priority for ID cards because it has been hardest hit by the insurgency but Ibrahim said there were plans to extend the scheme.

The UNHCR is working with Nigeria’s National Identity Card Management Commission, as well as village chiefs of displaced communities, he added.

(Source: AFP)

Following frequent attacks by Boko Haram insurgents, some community leaders in Madagali, Adamawa state, have threatened that their people would relocate to neighbouring Cameroon.

Speaking during a presentation of relief materials by NEMA to those affected by recent attacks on Gulak town, the headquarters of the council on Thursday, the community leaders expressed disatisfation with the situation adding that distribution of food to the affected communities was not their ”top priority.”

Yusuf Muhammad, chairman of the council, said security of lives and property was their major concern.

”Our top priority in Madagali local Government Area is that we need security not food. Government, as matter of urgency should bring lasting solutions to stop excessive attacks and destruction on our people. If the deadly attacks continue, we have no other alternative rather than to relocate to Cameroon Republic,” Mr. Muhammed said.

He complained that the people of the area, ”were more affected by the insurgency and yet were neglected as if they were not Nigerians.” The council boss said insurgents lived just three kilometres away from Madagali area and this was why they (sect) find it easy to attack the community.

He urged the government to deploy more soldiers to the area to protect the people. Binta Garba, an APC Senator at the event, confirmed what the council chairman said as ”true.” Mrs. Garba said both Madagali and Michika local government areas were neglected in terms of Federal government intervention. ”Are we really part of Nigeria,? If yes; Government should prove to us and treat us as Nigerians,” the senator said.

Responding, the Chairman, Senate Committee on Special Duties, Abdulazeez Nyako, thanked the council chairman for his frankness. Mr. Nyako assured the people of the area that he would table the matter when he returned to the senate.

Mustafa Maihaja, Director General of NEMA, who was represented by an air commodore, Sunday Ohemu, said the relief materials were part of the government’s intervention meant to bring succour to the community. Three trucks loaded with assorted food and non-food items were presented to the community.

Source: Premium Times

The Lagos State Directorate of Public Prosecutions has arraigned a Cameroonian, Leudjou Joel, for the alleged murder of his Nigerian employer, Miss Dayo Eniola. Joel, who worked as a cleaner for 33-year-old Eniola in the Ikoyi area of Lagos, was said to have allegedly stabbed his employer to death last December.

Twenty-one-year- old Joel was arraigned on murder charges before the Lagos State High Court in Igbosere. The Attorney General of Lagos State, Mr. Adeniyi Kazeem, who led the prosecution team that took Joel before Justice Adedayo Akintoye on Monday, told the court that the foreigner stabbed his Nigerian employer to death over his rejected request for salary advance.

He allegedly committed the crime at No. 15, Prince Tayo Adesanya Street, Park View Estate, Ikoyi, Lagos. Upon Joel’s arraignment on Monday, Kazeem prayed the court to order that the accused be remanded in the prison custody, pending commencement of trial. Justice Akintoye made an order that Joel should be remanded at the Ikoyi Prison. She adjourned till January 18, 2018 for commencement of trial.

Source: The Punch

Boko Haram militants have launched an attack on a village outside the northeast Nigerian city of Maiduguri, killing at least six farmers.

Locals and the civilian militia said the fatalities took place on Sunday, when the Takfiri extremist group raided Lawanti village in the Jere area of Borno state.

“Our people went to the farm to work. Seven Boko Haram on two motorbikes met them and slaughtered two, then killed the other four. They killed six people in all,” said Mohammed Asheik, from the Civilian Joint Task Force assisting the Nigerian military with security in the northeast.

Jidda Ahmed, a local resident, also confirmed the report and said his elder brother, Musa Jidda, had been “shot and beheaded” as he tried to flee.

Over the past months, attacks on isolated rural communities in the remote state of Borno have been a feature of Boko Haram’s militancy.

Boko Haram 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 Nigerian military launched renewed counter-terrorism offensives after the end of the rainy season in northeastern Nigeria in September. Those offensives have diminished Boko Haram’s capacity to launch attacks, but the government warns that the group can still attack civilians at “soft” targets such as mosques, markets, and camps for displaced people.

At least 20,000 people have been killed and more than 2.6 million others displaced as a result of eight years of Boko Haram militancy, which has also affected Nigeria’s neighbors, including Niger, Cameroon, and Chad.

Source:Presstv

Gunmen have killed at least 11 traders in central Nigeria, police said Wednesday, in the latest violence in the region, which has been hit by decades of ethnic and sectarian strife.

The traders were returning from a rural market in the Riyom district of Plateau state when they were ambushed by “unknown assailants” on Tuesday, said police spokesman Tyopev Terna.

“Eleven people who were returning from a weekly village market in Makera village were shot dead at about 7:30 pm (1830 GMT) yesterday”, he told AFP.

Four other traders were injured in the attack, which happened some 30 kilometers (19 miles) south of the state capital, Jos, heh added.

An investigation has been launched to establish the motive for the attack and to identify the victims, who are believed to be from the Fulani ethnic group.

Plateau state lies in Nigeria’s so-called Middle Belt that separates the predominantly Muslim north from the largely Christian south.

It has long been a hotbed of ethnic, sectarian and religious tensions between indigenous Christian farming communities and the Muslim settler Hausa/Fulani cattle herders.

Tensions typically boil over into tit-for-tat violence over access to land and resources, and the struggle for political control.

Riyom district has been hit by waves of violence between farmers and herders.

Last month two people were killed in Jol village in the area after a young herder’s body was found nearby. The cattle drivers were blamed.

At least 29 were killed in an attack targeting people sheltered in a rural primary school in nearby Bassa district.

The attack was apparently in revenge for the death of six Fulani herders who were killed by unidentified assailants in the area.

(Source: AFP)