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Nigeria: Christmas bombing suspect re-captured
The alleged mastermind of a radical Islamist sect’s Christmas Day church bombing fled across Nigeria after escaping police custody and hid for about a month before finally being apprehended Friday, authorities said.
The arrest of Kabiru Sokoto by Nigeria’s secret police and military comes after his escape led to national embarrassment amid the increasingly bloody attacks carried out by the sect known as Boko Haram. Though President Goodluck Jonathan fired the nation’s top police official, the nation’s weak central government still appears unable to stop the sect from attacking at will and disappearing into the shadows.
Officers from the State Security Service and soldiers raided a home early Friday morning in Mutum Biyu in Taraba state where they suspected Sokoto was hiding, said Marilyn Ogar, a spokeswoman for the secret police agency. They found Sokoto hiding behind a rack of drying laundry, Ogar said.
Authorities did not say how they found Sokoto, though secret police have in the past tracked suspects using the signals from their mobile phones. Ogar said Kabiru was hiding in a suspected accomplice’s home, but it wasn’t clear what his plans where. He initially fled to Nasarawa state, which borders Abuja, then to Taraba state, which borders Cameroon, she said.
Sokoto, wearing a green Puma T-shirt, appeared before journalists at a news conference at the secret police’s Abuja headquarters. He only answered “yes” when asked if he was Kabiru Sokoto.
Police named Sokoto, an alleged member of the radical sect known as Boko Haram, as the prime suspect for the Dec. 25 bombing of St. Theresa Catholic Church in Madalla, a city just outside of Nigeria’s capital Abuja. That attack killed at least 44 people, church officials say, as a car bomb detonated just as worshippers left an early morning Christmas Mass.
Boko Haram claimed responsibility for that attack and two others carried out the same day. The sect, 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 Shariah law and avenge Muslim killings in Nigeria, a multiethnic nation of more than 160 million people.
Officers arrested Sokoto in January at the official compound of the Borno state governor in Abuja. Borno state, in Nigeria’s arid and dusty northeast, is Boko Haram’s spiritual home.
