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Nigeria: Boko Haram spokesman arrested
The State Security Service, which has plainclothes investigators across Nigeria, is charged with securing the nation, However, it is an agency long associated with suppressing political dissent, rather than putting down the sectarian violence now being carried out by Boko Haram.
In November, the secret police claimed it made a major breakthrough in stopping the sect by arresting Ali Sanda Umar Konduga, a supposed Boko Haram spokesman who used the name al-Zawahiri. Konduga implicated a Nigerian senator in taking part in the group.
But Konduga, later sentenced to three years in prison, acknowledged he had not made a statement on behalf of Boko Haram for months and that the group had expelled him on suspicion he was a government spy.
Boko Haram, whose name means “Western education is sacrilege” in the local Hausa language, is carrying out increasingly sophisticated and bloody attacks in its campaign to implement strict Islamic law and avenge Muslim killings in Nigeria.
The sect was blamed for at least 510 killings last year alone, according to an Associated Press count. This year, it is blamed for killing at least 270 people in January alone. On January 20, the sect carried out a coordinated assault on police stations and government agencies in the northern city of Kano that killed 185.
Boko Haram has splintered into three factions, with one wing increasingly willing to kill as it maintains contact with terrorist groups in North Africa and Somalia, diplomats and security sources say.
With that wing viewing a wide variety of people and institutions as potential targets, even politicians with ties to Boko Haram can no longer consider themselves safe.
Violence by Boko Haram has increasingly begun targeting Christians, inflaming longtime tensions in a nation largely divided into a Christian south and a Muslim north. Thousands have died in rioting sparked by ethnic and religious differences in the country since it became a democracy in 1999.
On Wednesday, about 2,000 mourners gathered at a Catholic church near Abuja for a mass burial of victims of a Boko Haram bombing there that killed at least 44 people, church officials said.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.
