Seven foreigners, including a Briton, Italian and Lebanese, are in the den of kidnappers in the North. Their hosts belong to an extremist Islamist group with a record of hostage-taking and murder.
Ansaru, which is described as a jihadi organisation, yesterday claimed responsibility for Saturday’s attack on a construction camp in the town of Jama’are, in Bauchi State.
Ansaru’s full name is Jama’atu Ansarul Musilimina Fi Biladis Sudan, which roughly translates as “Vanguards for the Protection of Muslims in Black Africa”.
The group has risen to prominence only in recent months.
It claimed responsibility for a dawn raid on a major police station in Abuja last year, where it said hundreds of prisoners were released. Last month, it attacked a convoy of Nigerian troops en route to deployment in Mali.
The group said the abduction of the Frenchman last year, who is still missing, was motivated by France’s ban of the full-face veil and its support for military action against Islamist insurgents in Mali.
Britain in November put Ansaru on its official “terrorist group” list, saying it was aligned with al Qaeda and was behind the kidnap of a Briton and an Italian killed last year during a failed rescue attempt.
“Ansaru is an Islamist terrorist organisation based in Nigeria emerged in 2012 and are motivated by an anti-Nigerian Government and anti-Western agenda. They are broadly aligned with Al Qa’ida,” said a source.
Ansaru’s statement claimed it committed the abduction ‘based on the transgression and atrocities shown to the religion of Allah by the European countries in many places such as Afghanistan and Mali’.
It previously claimed responsibility for the December kidnapping of a French national working on a renewal energy project in Katsina State.
Ansaru members declared themselves as a breakaway group from Boko Haram in January 2012. Its aims are unknown – but they have a different message from Boko Haram, according to Raffaello Pantucci, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute.
He said: “The security situation in some parts of Nigeria remains fluid and unpredictable. They seem to disagree with some of Boko Haram’s strategies – in particular, they disagreed with Boko Haram’s tendency to kill Muslims.
“They seem to be more internationally focused, they talk a lot more in global jihad terms and they seem very eager to cultivate that side of their image. It makes them more dangerous.”
The Foreign Office in London said it was aware of the reports and was checking with the authorities in Abuja. The Prime Minister’s office said the government’s priority was to establish the facts about the case.
In response to a question about whether the UK would help in any rescue operation, a No 10 spokeswoman said: “I think that the Foreign Office will want to do what they can.”
A guard at the construction camp was shot dead in the raid. According to reports, the raid was preceded by an attack on the local police station where two vehicles were blown up.
It is the worst foreign kidnap case in the North since an insurgency led by the Islamist militant group Boko Haram and other organisations intensified nearly two years ago.
Ansaru, whose full name – Jama’atu Ansarul Musilimina Fi Biladis Sudan – means Vanguards for the Protection of Muslims in Black Africa, claimed responsibility for the kidnapping of a French national last December, citing France’s ban on full-face veils and its support for military action in Mali as reasons for the abduction.
The group is thought to be a breakaway from Boko Haram and seems to have a sharper focus on global jihad rather than a domestic political agenda.
Last year, UK special forces failed in an attempt to rescue Chris McManus, an engineer from Oldham who had been held hostage in the North for 10 months. He and an Italian hostage, Franco Lamolinara, were executed by their kidnappers as Nigerian troops backed by a unit of the Special Boat Service launched an operation to free them.
Senior British Government sources said there had been no ‘coherent’ ransom demand from the terrorists.
Turin-based La Stampa newspaper reported that negotiations had been taking place for the release of the Italian hostage through contacts in the West African state of Mauritania.
Another report said Mauritanian businessman and politician Moustafa Ould Imam Chafi had been at the centre of the negotiations.
Chafi, 52, helped secure the release of 28 Spaniards kidnapped in Mauritania in 2010, and the release of Italian tourist Sergio Cicala and his wife last year.
He has been banned from Mauritania, where he is wanted for allegedly supporting terrorism.
Whitehall has been embroiled in a diplomatic row with the Italian government, which accused Britain of failing to tell them in advance of the rescue mission on the heavily fortified terrorist-held compound on the outskirts of Sokoto.
Italian news reports said an autopsy on Mr Lamolinara, whose body was flown back to Rome found that he was shot in the head three or four times at close range.
In December more than 30 attackers stormed a house in Kaduna, killing two people and kidnapping a French engineer working on a renewable energy project there.
Chinese construction workers have been killed by gunmen around Maiduguri, where Boko Haram was formed. In the most recent attack on foreigners, assailants attacked North Korean doctors working for a hospital in Yobe State, stabbing two to death and beheading a third. No group claimed responsibility for that attack.
Foreign embassies in Nigeria have issued travel warnings regarding northern Nigeria for months. Worries about abductions have increased with the French military intervention in Mali, as its troops and Malian soldiers try to force out Islamist fighters who took over that nation’s north in the months following a military coup.
Last week the US embassy in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, put out a warning following the killings of polio workers in the northern city of Kano and the killing of the North Korean doctors. “The security situation in some parts of Nigeria remains fluid and unpredictable,” the embassy said.
Before it announced a ceasefire, Boko Haram had caused havoc. Since 2009, Boko Haram has literally seized power in the Northeast. A report released a day before Abubakar was unveiled as the new police chief said the insurgent group has killed at least 935 people since 2009, including more than 250 in the first weeks of 2012.
The report by Human Rights Watch said Boko Haram, which means “Western education is sinful” is loosely modeled on Afghanistan’s Taliban. It has claimed responsibility for bombing churches, police stations, military facilities, banks and beer parlours in the mainly Muslim north.
The sect focuses its attacks mostly on the police, military and government, but has recently increased its attacks on Christian institutions. It claims it is fighting enemies who have wronged its members through violence, arrests or economic neglect and corruption.
Bomb attacks and gun battles in Kano, killed 186 people on January 20, 2012 in Boko Haram’s most deadly attack to date.
Senior West Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch Corinne Dufka said: “Boko Haram’s attacks show a complete and utter disregard for human life. The Nigerian authorities need to call a halt to this campaign of terror and bring to justice those responsible for planning and carrying out these reprehensible crimes.”
The report said 550 people were killed in 115 separate attacks by Boko Haram last year, mostly in Borno State, where the sect was founded in 2002.
Gone were the days when the group was into drive-by shootings and petrol bombs. Now it is into suicide attacks using large and increasingly sophisticated explosives. A suicide car bomb last year killed 25 people at the United Nations headquarters in Abuja.
In July 2009, the sect launched an uprising in the northeast in which more than 800 people were killed in five days of fighting with security forces.
The sect originally said it wanted sharia (Islamic law) to be applied more widely across Nigeria.
London-based risk adviser for Eurasia Group said in a research note: “Jonathan’s inability to respond effectively, or articulate a credible strategy, reinforces the growing perception of a deep leadership void in Abuja. So far, militarisation of the region and strict curfews have only had limited effect and huge (military) spending outlays in 2012 offer little hope for a credible broader strategy.”
A source versed in the Boko Haram evolution said the government’s violent management of the group was counter-productive. He said the government, knowing the extremist nature of the group, should have throd with caution and not kill its leader, which was the beginning of its violent attacks on Nigeria.
He said: “They started their movement in 2001. They were ‘preaching’ and going about within the North here ‘propagating’ their own ideals within the state wearing their palms and kinds of uniforms. But our government did not manage them well. They tried to be pro-active but they ended up being hostile to them. And so, because of the enormity of their resistance, they started fighting back. So, they started targeting police men, especially the ones called “Operation Flash 1″ to kill them back. Since then, they made it a raging battle between them and the security forces. But the actual crisis we are now witnessing began in April of 2009 when some of the members of the Yusuphia Movement were returning from a journey and they had an accident. And many of them died in the accident. And as they made to go and bury some of their members that died in the accident, and they were moving in very large numbers of motorbikes, all without helmets. They were then intercepted by the Operation Flash 1 on their way to the grave yard ordering them to go back and wear helmets. And because they resisted, the policemen started shooting them and about 20 of them were hit by the bullets but they did not die. And they took them to the teaching hospital. But when it came to the donation of blood to save the lives of their people, the police drove all of them away from the premises of the teaching hospital, saying that they were preventing the outbreak of a riot or whatever. And they were denied the opportunity to donate blood for their people and they lost them.”
He added: “Afterwards, the late Mohammed held a rally in April and read out what he called an open letter written to the Nigerian President and other leaders. In the letter, he said his group was not going to forgive the shooting of their members and that they would hit back. But my point is the government did not take this thing serious until July of 2009 when things went out of hand. Government did not do anything about that piece of information. In July, they then launched a massive attack on government buildings and police stations and the Operation Flash 1 later discovered that this was not something they could contain.
“Mohammed was thereafter killed and his body displayed like they did to Gadaffi in Libya. Between November 2009 till about June of 2010, everybody thought that it was over. Everything was quiet.
“But by July 2010, they suddenly came out to celebrate what they called the one year anniversary of their leader that was killed. And that was how they started going from house-to-house exposing people who they thought exposed them or reported their members, shooting traditional rulers or anyone they see in uniform and that is what brought us to where we are today.
“So, when Operation Flash 1 could not contain them, it was disbanded and Operation Flash 2 was initiated, and this time around, it was being reinforced with more soldiers. Then, when that could not help, the Federal Government brought in the Special Joint Task Force. And since the introduction of the JTF, the situation so escalated because they did not have the intelligent system to arrest the situation.”
