Nigeria’s military is offering about $1.8 million in rewards for information leading to the arrest of top members of a radical Islamist sect that has killed hundreds of people in the country this year alone.
Lt. Col. Sagir Musa said in a statement Friday the bounty for Boko Haram sect leader Abubakar Shekau is $312,500.
The statement says information on four other named top sect officials would earn the informant $156,000 each. It then listed 14 “commanders” and each had a $62,500 bounty.
Police say a Massachusetts man left his girlfriend’s 2-year-old son in a car while he went shopping for Black Friday bargains, then went home with his new 51-inch flat screen television and left the toddler behind.
In a sustained follow-up operations on Wednesday afternoon, the combined troops of the Joint Task Force (JTF) Operation Restore Order, 333 Air Defence Regiment, the Department of State Security, supported by armoured personnel carriers (APCs) with helicopters conducted a major offensive operations, killing a high profile Boko Haram commander, Ibn Saleh Ibrahim.
Spokesman of the JTF, Lieutenant-Colonel Sagir Musa, in a statement on Wednesday, said the offensive operation against the insurgent terrorist took place at Nganaram, Bulabulin and Bayan Quarters areas of Maiduguri, Borno State.
Police and protesters clashed in Spain on Wednesday as millions of workers went on strike across Europe to protest spending cuts they say have made the economic crisis worse.
Hundreds of flights were cancelled, car factories and ports were at a standstill and trains barely ran in Spain and Portugal where unions held their first ever coordinated general strike.
Riot police arrested at least two protesters in Madrid and hit others with batons, witnesses said, and in Rome students pelted police with rocks in a protest over money-saving plans for the school system.
According to reports, one of the issues raised by the government team was that one of the mediators had taken contrary position against the government-funded Joint Task Force (JTF), while another was said to have a son fighting alongside the Al-Qaeda in Islamic Magreb (AQIM) in Mali. Another member was said to have only recently been forgiven by the sect after an accusation of financial impropriety.
While such reports were still taken with a pinch of salt by many with the belief that the government and the sect would find a way through, the announcement by General Buhari last week appeared a huge stake. Buhari, while speaking at the Board of Trustees meeting of his party, the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) said he could not mediate for the sect.
The General said: “How can I represent people I do not know, that I do not believe in whatever their cause is? How can I work for a government that has failed to do the most important thing of protecting lives and property with all the military, with all the resources available? How do I work for them?”
Dozens of young men have been shot dead in Nigeria by the military in Maiduguri, residents in the north-eastern city have told the BBC.
An imam told the BBC about 11 youths from his street alone were killed, including four of his own sons.
The alleged extrajudicial executions happened as Amnesty International accused the security forces of abuses in its crackdown on Islamist militants.
Jimmy Savile was one of Britain’s biggest stars ”” and, allegedly, one of its worst sexual predators. Now the nation is asking whether there was a link between one and the other.
Was this man at the heart of the nation’s popular culture a product of the permissive 1960s and ’70s, or do the conditions that allegedly let him get away with repeated child sex abuse still exist, even as awareness of the problem is more widespread?
“We’re kidding ourselves if we think it is all hunky dory now, but obviously it was more lax,” said Sarah Nelson, a child abuse expert at Edinburgh University. “The culture among disc jockeys at the time allowed a license you wouldn’t get now.”
At least seven people have been killed and dozens injured in a suicide bombing during Mass at a Catholic church in northern Nigeria, officials say.
An explosive-laden vehicle drove into the church and detonated its load, ripping a hole in the wall and roof.
The attack happened in Kaduna, which has been targeted by Islamist militant group Boko Haram in the recent past.
State officials say someone hacked into the Department of Revenue, exposing about 3.6 million South Carolina tax returns.
Gov. Nikki Haley said Friday about 387,000 credit and debit card numbers were also exposed, and 16,000 of those were unencrypted. State officials are urging anyone who has filed a state tax return since 1998 to call a toll-free number to determine whether their information is affected.
He knew what he was taking on, [Bishop James] Jones says. He was inducted into Hillsborough, and the bereaved families’ campaign against what they complained was a grievous injustice and a South Yorkshire police cover-up, in his early days as Liverpool’s bishop. In 1999, a year into his post, the Hillsborough Family Support Group asked him to preside at the memorial service for the disaster’s 10th anniversary, and they explained their continuing agonies.
So he knew the panel would be examining the actions of the police and other powerful people and organisations, none of whom had been held legally accountable, taken responsibility or at that stage apologised for the failings that caused 96 people to die. The panel’s report removed 23 years’ distortion of the truth about what happened on 15 April 1989 at Liverpool’s FA Cup semi-final against Nottingham Forest.
“I was aware,” he tells the Guardian, in his first major interview since the panel reported, “that MPs, the police, the media, the judiciary, possibly the government of the day, were in the frame. People might think we in the church are naive; we’re not. We know exactly what we are engaging with.”
Several Nigerian soldiers have been killed by suspected Islamist militants in the north-eastern town of Potiskum, an army source has told the BBC.
The town has seen days of violence, with 31 reported killed and hundreds of residents fleeing since Thursday.
Meanwhile, China has a diplomatic protest against the killing of a Chinese construction worker in the north-eastern city of Maiduguri.
The Nigerian army says it has arrested a senior commander of Boko Haram, as attacks by suspected members of the Islamist group continue.
Shuaibu Muhammed Bama was detained at the home of a serving senator in the city of Maiduguri, the army said.
The senator – who has not been named – denies the army’s claim, which has fuelled suspicions that some politicians are helping the militants.
A controversial Tanzanian Muslim cleric has been arrested for stoking religious hatred, police have said.
Sheikh Ponda Issa Ponda’s arrest comes after Muslim protesters vandalised and torched five churches in the main city, Dar es Salaam, last week.
The violence followed rumours that a Christian boy urinated on a Koran.
Widespread and systematic murder and persecution by Boko Haram, a militant Islamist group in northern Nigeria, likely amount to crimes against humanity, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Government security forces have also engaged in numerous abuses, including extrajudicial killings, Human Rights Watch said.
The 98-page report, “Spiraling Violence: Boko Haram Attacks and Security Force Abuses in Nigeria,” catalogues atrocities for which Boko Haram has claimed responsibility. It also explores the role of Nigeria’s security forces, whose own alleged abuses contravene international human rights law and might also constitute crimes against humanity. The violence, which first erupted in 2009, has claimed more than 2,800 lives.
The end of hope was widely expected, and all the more unwelcome for that. When it arrived yesterday afternoon, some railed against it; some were mute and bowed. But all in the Welsh town of Machynlleth were forced to face up to one heartbreaking reality: five-year-old April Jones was not coming home.
Since her disappearance on Monday, the 2,500-strong community living in the green valley on the southern edge of Snowdonia National Park has put on an extraordinary display of solidarity under the eye of 24-hour news coverage. Normal life ceased. The whole town set out in search of the missing girl, their missing girl. News that she needed medication and suffered from mild cerebral palsy only made their efforts more urgent.
The police, astonished by the intensity of the town’s response, struggled to cope with the stream of emotion and demands that people be allowed to help, and to conceal the fact that they were increasingly pessimistic about the chances of finding the little girl alive.
Nairobi’s police commissioner Njoroge Ndirangu reported that an examination of the crime scene indicated a limpet mine or an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) containing nails, ball-bearings and other pieces of shrapnel was electronically detonated alongside the wall of the Christian education building of St Cyprian’s Anglican Church at approximately 10:30 local time. Shrapnel from the blast killed an eight year old boy and wounded several children attending a Bible study. Six children were taken in serious condition to the capital’s Kenyatta National Hospital for treatment.
Popular sentiment in Nairobi lays the blast on al Shabaab…the Somali terror group….
However, the use of an IED might have been a copycat attack designed to drive the church off its land….
Unidentified gunmen massacred at least two dozen university students in northern Nigeria Monday night in the city of Mubi near the border with Cameroon. The attacks lasted more than an hour, with gunmen targeting specific students by name rather than indiscriminately firing.
Suspicion fell immediately on Boko Haram, a violent Islamist organization in northern Nigeria that has typically attacked Christian churches and security forces. Student leaders, meanwhile, suggested that the killings may have been tied to internal student political campaigns. No group has yet claimed responsibility for the attack.
Aside from Boko Haram’s history of bloody attacks on civilians, the very name of the group ”“ which means “Western education is a sin” ”“ stokes suspicion of their involvement. But even if the group is found to be involved, the purpose of such an attack would not be part of some global jihad.
The teenager was walking down the Wando High School hallway when someone grabbed his booksack strap and shoved him into the boys’ bathroom.
He tried to get away, but his classmate used both hands to force his head and neck down into a urinal. Desperate to break loose, he swung his leg backward into his aggressor’s crotch and fled the bathroom.
He’s the kind of kid who is picked on a lot, and it’s the kind of incident that schools and police take seriously.
Read it all from the front page of yesterday’s local paper.
Nigeria’s “robust” approach to neutralizing a threat posed by Islamist sect Boko Haram using military force, holding indirect talks with the group and improving education in the north is paying off, the Nigerian president said on Wednesday.
Boko Haram, which wants to carve out an Islamic state in northern Nigeria, has been blamed for more than 1,000 deaths since its insurgency intensified in 2010. The United States has designated three of Boko Haram’s senior members as terrorists.
In an interview with Reuters on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly’s annual gathering of world leaders, President Goodluck Jonathan also played down the significance of the government forces’ killing of the sect’s spokesman, Abu Qaqa, in a gun battle in Kano on September 16.
…while many Americans might think of sex trafficking as an international problem, it often starts in the United States. Prosecutor Lindsey Roberson has seen it happen.
One of her first cases involved a 17-year-old girl who met a guy at a downtown club. He wooed her, and then “took her out of town on a trip, and let her know what she would have to do to pay her way,” Roberson said.
“She had no ID, no cell phone; no way to contact her mother. And the guy ended up advertising her for sex on Backpage.com and trafficking her all the way out to California and back to Virginia.”
Every six minutes, a child goes missing in India.
They are boys like Irfan, drugged and abducted at the age of 9 by two men on a motorbike as he walked home one day after playing with friends.
“It was living hell these past two years, trying to figure out where we could find him,” said his father, Iqbal Ali. “I used to run a biscuit bakery, but from the day he disappeared, I got so caught up trying to meet politicians, police and people who claim to do magic to get children back, that I had to shut down my bakery. I had no time for it.”
The bishop who chaired the panel responsible for exposing the devastating truth about the Hillsborough disaster has called for a national debate to establish accountability and to allow those in positions of authority to win back trust.
As Liverpool play a highly-charged game at Anfield against Manchester United this weekend, the Bishop of Liverpool, the Right Rev James Jones, said that society was at a “crossroads”. His report, published last week, finally disclosed the extent of the cover-ups and lies told as authorities attempted to deflect blame for the 96 deaths.
He called for discussion that would help to restore accountability and trust to the police and other authorities. “It is timely for us to reconsider how people in positions of power, whoever they may be, behave in a transparent and accountable manner because to do so will then win back the trust which is so vulnerable at the moment in our society,” said the Bishop….
Read it all (requires subscription).
At 4pm on September 14, 2012, Pastor Bike (Zhang Mingxuan), Chairman of China House Church Alliance, and 17 co-workers from Yunnan, Jiangxi, Anhui, Jiangsu and South Korea, began distributing gospel tracts at the train station of Dezhou city, Shandong Province. Twenty minutes later, police from the police station of Decheng District took them away for interrogation.
It is important that you take the time to listen to this–it starts 36 minutes and 20 seconds in (click on the arrow above the “45 mins” to the left of the picture in the box).
Christians in Nigeria are coming under siege as terrorist group Boko Haram attacks churches to try to drive out Christians and destabilise the country. The Archbishop of Jos, the Most Rev Dr Benjamin Kwashi, describes the situation in Jos, Plateau State, to Release’s Andrew Boyd.
Listen to it all (from earlier this month, but still relevant and useful for our awareness and prayers–KSH)..
The Archbishop Metropolitan and Primate of All Nigeria, Anglican Communion, Most Reverend Nicholas Okoh, on Thursday. said that the survival of the Nigerian nation and respect for human life were the two main factors restraining Christians from fighting Boko Haram which had thrown the country into an insecure state.
Primate Okoh also described the proposed bill for Fulani Commission in which government seeks to create permanent routes and reserves in all states for Fulani pastoralists as a recipe for endless crisis.
The cleric, who stated this in his primatial address during the official opening of the standing committee meeting of the Church of Nigeria, Anglican Communion at the Cathedral Church of Emmanuel, Ado-Ekiti with the theme “…Resist the devil and he will flee from you,” called on President Goodluck Jonathan to act fast in tackling the prevailing insecurity in the nation before it gets out of hand.
The Nigerian army says it has killed seven suspected members of the Islamist militant group Boko Haram in a gun battle in the north of the country.
A spokesman said a further 13 people were arrested after an attack on an army checkpoint in Maiduguri.
Earlier, Nigerian police said they would mount a 24-hour guard of mobile-phone installations following Boko Haram attacks on masts in the north.
After a lull, terrorists yesterday struck in Sabon-Laye, the Gombe capital, where they exploded a bomb.
Although no life was confirmed lost at press time, the incident caused panic in the state capital and brought business activities to a standstill as shop owners and traders immediately shut their outlets and markets and rushed to their homes.
Nevertheless, the military in Borno State made a breakthrough yesterday as they recovered a register alleged to contain suspected Boko Haram members during a dawn raid in the home of a “commander” of the terrorist group.