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Nigeria military: Radical Islamist Boko Haram spokesman shot dead
Soldiers manning a checkpoint in northern Nigeria shot to death two ranking members of a radical Islamist sect responsible for hundreds of killings this year alone, a military official said Monday.
The dead included the spokesman for the sect known as Boko Haram, as well as a commander who operates in Kogi state south of Nigeria’s capital, the official said.
The shooting occurred Monday morning in Mariri, a town to the southeast of Kano, the largest city in Nigeria’s Muslim north. There, soldiers stopped a vehicle with the sect spokesman, the commander, the spokesman’s wife and their children, the official said.
It is unclear what happened next, though the official said soldiers shot dead both the commander and the spokesman. The wife and children remain in military custody, the official said.
The wife told soldiers the men had accompanied her to Kano where she sought medical help, the official said.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity as the information was not to be made immediately public Monday. Lt. Iweha Ikedichi, a military spokesman in the region, later told journalists that soldiers had only killed one man, the Boko Haram spokesman. However, the official who spoke to The Associated Press had been at the checkpoint and offered further details about the scene.
Government officials may be hesitating as they previously claimed in February to have arrested the sect’s spokesman, who uses the nom de guerre Abul Qaqa when speaking to journalists. Only days afterward, a spokesman using the same name told journalists: “We are waxing stronger by the day despite the arrest of some of our top members.”
