Nigeria News
Squeezed by the military, Boko Haram targets schools
Boko Haram insurgents have massacred dozens of students in recent weeks in Nigeria’s northeast, opening a new phase in their rebellion despite a nearly two-month-old military offensive against them.
The latest attack early Saturday saw gunmen storm a secondary boarding school in the village of Mamudo, where they rounded up students and staff in a dormitory, threw explosives and opened fire, killing 42 people, almost all of them students.
•Suspected Boko Haram members arrested
Nigerians have grown accustomed to mayhem inflicted by Islamist extremist group Boko Haram — as well as the military’s heavy-handed response — but the gruesomeness of the school massacre drew widespread disgust.
A spokesman for President Goodluck Jonathan said those behind the attack “will certainly go to hell.” Military officials did not respond to requests for comment on Monday.
The school shooting marks the third such attack in three weeks.
The insurgents’ reasons for targeting students are unclear, though some observers say they may be seeking to generate as much attention as possible through shocking tactics.
Some have called for the government to take a smarter approach in efforts to end Boko Haram’s four-year insurgency, warning that military force will not solve the problem.
Jonathan declared a state of emergency in the northeast on May 14, saying Boko Haram had managed to take control of a number of remote border areas, and a sweeping military offensive followed.
Abubakar Tsav, a respected former police commissioner for the economic capital Lagos, said security forces should focus more on on-the-ground intelligence.
That should be accompanied by an honest attempt at dialogue, he said.
“In a situation like this, what should normally happen is government should be able to send plainclothes police and security men,” said Tsav.
“If you go in uniform with guns, you will never get information. Go and find out who these people are and who are their sponsors.”
Boko Haram’s insurgency has played out in various phases over the past four years, including assassinations of local leaders and security forces before moving on to more sophisticated attacks.
The insurgents have during certain periods focused on attacking churches with suicide or car bombings. They have also carried out suicide attacks on UN headquarters in the capital Abuja and on one of the country’s most prominent newspapers.
A rash of school attacks occurred in 2012, but they mostly involved insurgents burning school buildings at night and resulted in relatively few casualties. Boko Haram roughly translates to “Western education is a sin.”
But the most recent school attacks have specifically targeted students with deadly consequences.
On June 16, gunmen opened fire on a secondary school in Damaturu, the capital of Yobe state, killing seven students and two teachers. Two of the attackers were also killed, the army said.
A day later, extremists shot dead nine students as they sat an exam in a private school in Maiduguri.
Two of the three recent attacks occurred in Yobe state, prompting the state government to close all secondary schools until the new term in September.
Abubakar Siddique Mohammed, a professor and head of the Centre for Democratic Development, Research and Training based in the northern city of Zaria, feared the attacks would lead more children to drop out of school in the impoverished region.
He also called for honest dialogue to end the insurgency.
“Thousands of troops have been deployed to the northeast aided by jets and other military hardware, but still killings continue in a brazen manner, which has manifested in the killings of students in their hostels,” said Mohammed.
The military has claimed successes and say they have pushed the insurgents out. There seemed to be an initial drop in attacks after the offensive began, but there are now signs the gains were short-lived.
It is also impossible to independently verify the military’s account since it has cut mobile phone service in much of the region and access to remote areas is restricted.
Boko Haram itself remains nebulous. It has claimed to be seeking an Islamic state in Africa’s most populous nation, but it is also believed to include various factions with different aims.
The government has formed a panel to look at possibilities for offering amnesty to insurgents, but some have questioned the effort’s sincerity.
Tsav did not want to speculate on the government’s intentions, but felt greater efforts must be made to find those who may be willing to make peace.
“We are dealing with a very serious situation in the north,” he said.
“We have people who do not care about their lives… With a person with this type of thinking, no amount of shooting will deter them, so the best solution is dialogue.”
–M.J. Smith of the AFP
——————————————————————————————————————————————-
Posted in Nigeria News. A DisNaija.Com network.
Source: PM News
DisNaija.Com publishes regular posts on Nigeria News, Nigerian Newspapers, Online Nigeria Gist.
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Follow @Dis_Naija
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The Kano State Government on Saturday said it has transferred 1,098 ‘almajiris’ to different states of the country.
The commissioner for local government, Murtala Garo, disclosed this while presenting a report before the state’s task force on COVID-19 at the government house, Kano.
Almajiris are children who are supposed to be learning Islamic studies while living with their Islamic teachers. Majority of them, however, end up begging on the streets of Northern Nigeria. They constitute a large number of Nigeria’s over 10 million out-of-school children.
Mr Garo said the Kano government transported 419 almajiris to Katsina, 524 to Jigawa and 155 to Kaduna. He said all of them tested negative for coronavirus before leaving the Kano State.
Despite the coronavirus test done in Kano for the almajiris, the Jigawa government earlier said it would quarantine for two weeks all the almajiris that recently arrived from Kano.
Mr Garo said another 100 almajiris scheduled to be taken to Bauchi State also tested negative to COVID-19.
In a remark, Governor Abdullahi Ganduje said the COVID-19 situation in Kano was getting worse. He appealed for a collaborative effort to curtail the spread of the virus in the state.
Mr Ganduje, who commended residents for complying with the lockdown imposed in the state, said the decision was taken to halt the spread of the virus.
Kano State, as of Saturday night, has 77 coronavirus cases, according to the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control.
The decision to transfer the Kano almajiris is part of the agreement reached between Northern governors that almajiris in each state be transferred to their states of origin.
However, even before the latest agreement by the governors, the Kano government had been transferring almajiris to other states and neighbouring countries after it banned street begging in the state, most populous in Northern Nigeria.
Despite the transfers, however, no concrete step has been taken to ensure such children do not return to Kano streets as there is freedom of movement across Nigeria although interstate travel was recently banned to check the spread of the coronavirus.
Sourced From: Premium Times Nigeria
By Ugochukwu Alaribe
Operatives of the Abia State Vigilante Service, AVS, popularly known as ‘Bakassi Boys’ have arrested 24 market women hidden in a container truck, at Ekwereazu Ngwa, the boundary community between Abia and Akwa Ibom states.
The market women, said to be from Akwa Ibom State, were on their way to Aba, when they were arrested with the truck driver and two of his conductors for violating the lockdown order by the state government.
Driver of the truck, Moses Asuquo, claimed he was going to Aba to purchase stock fish, but decided to assist the market women, because they were stranded.
A vigilante source told Sunday Vanguard that the vehicle was impounded while the market women were sent back to Akwa Ibom State.
Commissioner for Home Land Security, Prince Dan Okoli, who confirmed the incident, said that smuggling of people into the state poses great threat to the state government’s efforts to contain the spread of COVID- 19.
Sourced From: Vanguard News
Operatives of the State Criminal Investigation and Intelligence Department (SCIID), Yaba of the Lagos State police command have arrested one Mrs Nene Steve for allegedly killing her maid, Joy Adole
The maid was allegedly beaten to death by Nene for requesting for her salary at their residence located at 18, Ogundola Street, Bariga area in Lagos.
Narrating the incident, Philips Ejeh, an elder brother to the deceased said that he was sad when they informed him that his sister was beaten to death.
He explained that the deceased was an indigene of Benue State brought to Lagos through an agent and started working with her as a maid in January 2020.
‘’She reported that her boss refused to pay her and anytime she asked for her salary she will start beating her.
She was making an attempt to leave the place but due to the total lockdown she remained there until Sunday when her boss said she caught her stealing noodles and this led to her serious beating and death,’’ Ejeh said.
He called on Lagos State Government and well- meaning people in the country to help them in getting justice for the victim.
The police spokesman, Bala Elkana, stated that the woman and her husband came to Bariga Police Station to a report that their house girl had committed suicide.
Detectives were said to have visited the house and suspected foul play with the position of the rope and bruises all over the body which confirmed that the girl had been tortured to death and the boss decided to hang up the girl to make it look like suicide.
He said: “The police moved on with their investigation and found a lot of sign of violence on her body that she has been tortured before a rope was put on her neck.’’
He added that the police removed the corpse and deposited it in the mortuary for autopsy to further ascertain the cause of the death.
Elkana said the matter has been transferred from Bariga police station to Panti for further investigation while the couple have been arrested and will be charged to court.
Ostensibly alarmed by the latest killings of dozens of soldiers by Boko Haram insurgents, President Muhammadu Buhari has summoned an urgent meeting of Service Chiefs to find ways to stop the trend.
He has also dispatched the Minister of Defence, Mansur Dan Ali, to the neighbouring Republic of Chad for an urgent meeting with President Idris Deby and his defence counterpart.
Knowledgeable sources said in Abuja on Friday that the president is worried by on the deterioration of security situation on the Nigeria – Chad Border that has led to the recently increased Boko Haram terrorism in the area.
The sources which did not want to be named in Abuja said: “Nigeria has a Chad problem in the Multi-National Joint Task Force (MNJTF) put together to secure the Lake Chad basin areas and repeal the Boko Haram terrorist attacks against all the countries neighbouring the Lake.”
The sources noted that Chad is believed to be having their own internal security challenges and this has reportedly led to their pulling away their own troops manning their own border around Lake Chad, saying: “That lacuna is being exploited by the Boko Haram terrorists, who go in and out of Nigeria, Niger and Cameroon to launch terrorist acts. This is a clear illustration of the fact that terrorism is beyond national borders.”
When contacted, the Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu, confirmed that the Defence Minister is going to Chad but said he is unaware of the purpose.
Meanwhile, the military authorities are said to be in the process of identifying the families of the latest victims with a view to making contact with them.
Credible sources revealed that it is the reason the president is yet to make any pronouncement on the matter.
“The President has called an urgent meeting with the Service Chiefs, as well as the fact that families of the latest victims of the Boko Haram are being identified and contacts made before a government pronouncement on the tragic attacks. This, it is understood, is the reason for the silence of the government over the incident,” the source said.
Sourced From: Tribune
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Nigeria News
Squeezed by the military, Boko Haram targets schools
Boko Haram insurgents have massacred dozens of students in recent weeks in Nigeria’s northeast, opening a new phase in their rebellion despite a nearly two-month-old military offensive against them.
The latest attack early Saturday saw gunmen storm a secondary boarding school in the village of Mamudo, where they rounded up students and staff in a dormitory, threw explosives and opened fire, killing 42 people, almost all of them students.
•Suspected Boko Haram members arrested
Nigerians have grown accustomed to mayhem inflicted by Islamist extremist group Boko Haram — as well as the military’s heavy-handed response — but the gruesomeness of the school massacre drew widespread disgust.
A spokesman for President Goodluck Jonathan said those behind the attack “will certainly go to hell.” Military officials did not respond to requests for comment on Monday.
The school shooting marks the third such attack in three weeks.
The insurgents’ reasons for targeting students are unclear, though some observers say they may be seeking to generate as much attention as possible through shocking tactics.
Some have called for the government to take a smarter approach in efforts to end Boko Haram’s four-year insurgency, warning that military force will not solve the problem.
Jonathan declared a state of emergency in the northeast on May 14, saying Boko Haram had managed to take control of a number of remote border areas, and a sweeping military offensive followed.
Abubakar Tsav, a respected former police commissioner for the economic capital Lagos, said security forces should focus more on on-the-ground intelligence.
That should be accompanied by an honest attempt at dialogue, he said.
“In a situation like this, what should normally happen is government should be able to send plainclothes police and security men,” said Tsav.
“If you go in uniform with guns, you will never get information. Go and find out who these people are and who are their sponsors.”
Boko Haram’s insurgency has played out in various phases over the past four years, including assassinations of local leaders and security forces before moving on to more sophisticated attacks.
The insurgents have during certain periods focused on attacking churches with suicide or car bombings. They have also carried out suicide attacks on UN headquarters in the capital Abuja and on one of the country’s most prominent newspapers.
A rash of school attacks occurred in 2012, but they mostly involved insurgents burning school buildings at night and resulted in relatively few casualties. Boko Haram roughly translates to “Western education is a sin.”
But the most recent school attacks have specifically targeted students with deadly consequences.
On June 16, gunmen opened fire on a secondary school in Damaturu, the capital of Yobe state, killing seven students and two teachers. Two of the attackers were also killed, the army said.
A day later, extremists shot dead nine students as they sat an exam in a private school in Maiduguri.
Two of the three recent attacks occurred in Yobe state, prompting the state government to close all secondary schools until the new term in September.
Abubakar Siddique Mohammed, a professor and head of the Centre for Democratic Development, Research and Training based in the northern city of Zaria, feared the attacks would lead more children to drop out of school in the impoverished region.
He also called for honest dialogue to end the insurgency.
“Thousands of troops have been deployed to the northeast aided by jets and other military hardware, but still killings continue in a brazen manner, which has manifested in the killings of students in their hostels,” said Mohammed.
The military has claimed successes and say they have pushed the insurgents out. There seemed to be an initial drop in attacks after the offensive began, but there are now signs the gains were short-lived.
It is also impossible to independently verify the military’s account since it has cut mobile phone service in much of the region and access to remote areas is restricted.
Boko Haram itself remains nebulous. It has claimed to be seeking an Islamic state in Africa’s most populous nation, but it is also believed to include various factions with different aims.
The government has formed a panel to look at possibilities for offering amnesty to insurgents, but some have questioned the effort’s sincerity.
Tsav did not want to speculate on the government’s intentions, but felt greater efforts must be made to find those who may be willing to make peace.
“We are dealing with a very serious situation in the north,” he said.
“We have people who do not care about their lives… With a person with this type of thinking, no amount of shooting will deter them, so the best solution is dialogue.”
–M.J. Smith of the AFP
——————————————————————————————————————————————-
Posted in Nigeria News. A DisNaija.Com network.
Source: PM News
DisNaija.Com publishes regular posts on Nigeria News, Nigerian Newspapers, Online Nigeria Gist.
Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
Nigeria News
Follow @Dis_Naija
Your Opinion Counts. Be sure To Leave A Comment, If You Have Any.
Please Like, Share or Tweet. Your Support Is Appreciated.
The Kano State Government on Saturday said it has transferred 1,098 ‘almajiris’ to different states of the country.
The commissioner for local government, Murtala Garo, disclosed this while presenting a report before the state’s task force on COVID-19 at the government house, Kano.
Almajiris are children who are supposed to be learning Islamic studies while living with their Islamic teachers. Majority of them, however, end up begging on the streets of Northern Nigeria. They constitute a large number of Nigeria’s over 10 million out-of-school children.
Mr Garo said the Kano government transported 419 almajiris to Katsina, 524 to Jigawa and 155 to Kaduna. He said all of them tested negative for coronavirus before leaving the Kano State.
Despite the coronavirus test done in Kano for the almajiris, the Jigawa government earlier said it would quarantine for two weeks all the almajiris that recently arrived from Kano.
Mr Garo said another 100 almajiris scheduled to be taken to Bauchi State also tested negative to COVID-19.
In a remark, Governor Abdullahi Ganduje said the COVID-19 situation in Kano was getting worse. He appealed for a collaborative effort to curtail the spread of the virus in the state.
Mr Ganduje, who commended residents for complying with the lockdown imposed in the state, said the decision was taken to halt the spread of the virus.
Kano State, as of Saturday night, has 77 coronavirus cases, according to the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control.
The decision to transfer the Kano almajiris is part of the agreement reached between Northern governors that almajiris in each state be transferred to their states of origin.
However, even before the latest agreement by the governors, the Kano government had been transferring almajiris to other states and neighbouring countries after it banned street begging in the state, most populous in Northern Nigeria.
Despite the transfers, however, no concrete step has been taken to ensure such children do not return to Kano streets as there is freedom of movement across Nigeria although interstate travel was recently banned to check the spread of the coronavirus.
Sourced From: Premium Times Nigeria
By Ugochukwu Alaribe
Operatives of the Abia State Vigilante Service, AVS, popularly known as ‘Bakassi Boys’ have arrested 24 market women hidden in a container truck, at Ekwereazu Ngwa, the boundary community between Abia and Akwa Ibom states.
The market women, said to be from Akwa Ibom State, were on their way to Aba, when they were arrested with the truck driver and two of his conductors for violating the lockdown order by the state government.
Driver of the truck, Moses Asuquo, claimed he was going to Aba to purchase stock fish, but decided to assist the market women, because they were stranded.
A vigilante source told Sunday Vanguard that the vehicle was impounded while the market women were sent back to Akwa Ibom State.
Commissioner for Home Land Security, Prince Dan Okoli, who confirmed the incident, said that smuggling of people into the state poses great threat to the state government’s efforts to contain the spread of COVID- 19.
Sourced From: Vanguard News
Operatives of the State Criminal Investigation and Intelligence Department (SCIID), Yaba of the Lagos State police command have arrested one Mrs Nene Steve for allegedly killing her maid, Joy Adole
The maid was allegedly beaten to death by Nene for requesting for her salary at their residence located at 18, Ogundola Street, Bariga area in Lagos.
Narrating the incident, Philips Ejeh, an elder brother to the deceased said that he was sad when they informed him that his sister was beaten to death.
He explained that the deceased was an indigene of Benue State brought to Lagos through an agent and started working with her as a maid in January 2020.
‘’She reported that her boss refused to pay her and anytime she asked for her salary she will start beating her.
She was making an attempt to leave the place but due to the total lockdown she remained there until Sunday when her boss said she caught her stealing noodles and this led to her serious beating and death,’’ Ejeh said.
He called on Lagos State Government and well- meaning people in the country to help them in getting justice for the victim.
The police spokesman, Bala Elkana, stated that the woman and her husband came to Bariga Police Station to a report that their house girl had committed suicide.
Detectives were said to have visited the house and suspected foul play with the position of the rope and bruises all over the body which confirmed that the girl had been tortured to death and the boss decided to hang up the girl to make it look like suicide.
He said: “The police moved on with their investigation and found a lot of sign of violence on her body that she has been tortured before a rope was put on her neck.’’
He added that the police removed the corpse and deposited it in the mortuary for autopsy to further ascertain the cause of the death.
Elkana said the matter has been transferred from Bariga police station to Panti for further investigation while the couple have been arrested and will be charged to court.
Ostensibly alarmed by the latest killings of dozens of soldiers by Boko Haram insurgents, President Muhammadu Buhari has summoned an urgent meeting of Service Chiefs to find ways to stop the trend.
He has also dispatched the Minister of Defence, Mansur Dan Ali, to the neighbouring Republic of Chad for an urgent meeting with President Idris Deby and his defence counterpart.
Knowledgeable sources said in Abuja on Friday that the president is worried by on the deterioration of security situation on the Nigeria – Chad Border that has led to the recently increased Boko Haram terrorism in the area.
The sources which did not want to be named in Abuja said: “Nigeria has a Chad problem in the Multi-National Joint Task Force (MNJTF) put together to secure the Lake Chad basin areas and repeal the Boko Haram terrorist attacks against all the countries neighbouring the Lake.”
The sources noted that Chad is believed to be having their own internal security challenges and this has reportedly led to their pulling away their own troops manning their own border around Lake Chad, saying: “That lacuna is being exploited by the Boko Haram terrorists, who go in and out of Nigeria, Niger and Cameroon to launch terrorist acts. This is a clear illustration of the fact that terrorism is beyond national borders.”
When contacted, the Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu, confirmed that the Defence Minister is going to Chad but said he is unaware of the purpose.
Meanwhile, the military authorities are said to be in the process of identifying the families of the latest victims with a view to making contact with them.
Credible sources revealed that it is the reason the president is yet to make any pronouncement on the matter.
“The President has called an urgent meeting with the Service Chiefs, as well as the fact that families of the latest victims of the Boko Haram are being identified and contacts made before a government pronouncement on the tragic attacks. This, it is understood, is the reason for the silence of the government over the incident,” the source said.
Sourced From: Tribune
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