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Nigeria: Boko Haram – more brazen – more dangerous
After the talk, Yusuf’s in-law Babakura Fugu said the family offered a list of demands and was upbeat about the chances for peace. Within 48 hours, Fugu was dead, killed by a Kalashnikov-carrying gunmen on a sunny afternoon. A claim of responsibility for the killing by one spokesman for Boko Haram would be angrily denied by another.
“This has created division lines among them which has further kept members of the sect apart,” said Lt. Col. Hassan Ifijeh Mohammed, a military spokesman in the area.
The most radical and “ideologically enhanced” faction is in contact with al-Qaida’s North Africa branch and likely Somalia-based terror group al-Shabaab, the diplomat said on condition of anonymity per embassy orders. It appears Shekau, once Yusuf’s second-in-commnand, now leads that faction, as well as exercises some control over the other ones.
Shekau, whom authorities thought they had killed in the 2009 crackdown until he began issuing audio and video messages, is unrepentant about the group’s violent ways.
“They’re saying we’re killing people not in a good way. Did we kill anybody (we shouldn’t have)?” Shekau asks in the local Hausa language in the recording of a sermon at an unknown location obtained by the AP. “We only killed people that Allah said we should kill. Whomever we kill, we kill because Allah says we should kill and we kill for a reason.”
Those targeted include police officers who testified against the group in open court and others. Shekau goes on to tell a story about how Boko Haram members stole the car of a woman who believed in the group. He ordered the men to return the car to the woman, who wept when they arrived, the imam said.
Shekau and other top Boko Haram commanders likely stay outside Nigeria, in neighboring Cameroon, Chad or Niger.
The group’s stepped-up violence suggests outsiders like al-Shabaab and al-Qaida’s north Africa branch are helping the group, the diplomat said. The suicide car-bombing of the U.N.’s Nigeria headquarters in the distant capital, Abuja, on Aug. 26 killed 24 people and wounded 116.
“Before, it was just armed thugs with AK-47s on motorcycles,” the diplomat said. “Now, (they are) coming up with these much more elaborate and much more devastating and complex car bombs.”
In Maiduguri, security has been increased. Soldiers peer from behind machine guns in sandbagged bunkers built along major roads. Members of the country’s secret police, sweating in ill-fitting dark suits under the desert sun, guard government buildings.
