Five days of fighting between government forces and a radical Islamist sect left dirt roads soaked with blood, buildings scorched and dozens dead, including the group’s leader, but revenge attacks were feared even as the national police claimed victory.
Mohammed Yusuf, head of the Boko Haram sect, was killed on Thursday after he was found hiding in a goat pen at the home of his in-laws, but the circumstances grew murkier on Friday.
Police said Yusuf was killed in a gunfight but a Nigerian army officer disputed that.
“He was arrested alive,” army Colonel Ben Ahonatu said. “There was no shootout.”
Police, who invited local journalists to view Yusuf’s battered corpse on Thursday evening, said he was killed in combat.
“Mohammed Yusuf ... died in a gunbattle between armed sect members and a joint military-police force,” said Christopher Dega, police commissioner of Borno state, of which Maiduguri is the capital.
A video shows what authorities said was Yusuf’s body. The corpse was in the middle of a street and the victim’s hands were cuffed. The injuries were severe, with gaping wounds to sections of his arms and abdomen.
Bursts of gunfire could be heard in the background.
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International called for investigations into Yusuf’s death and other killings during the upheaval in predominantly Muslim northern Nigeria. Emmanuel Ojukwu, spokesman of the national police, said Yusuf’s death spelled the end of his group, which espouses anti-Western views and had been gathering disciples for years.
“This group operates under a charismatic leader. They will no more have any inspiration,” Ojukwu said. “The leader who they thought was invincible and immortal has now been proved otherwise.”
But Charles Dokubo, analyst with the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs, said he expected more trouble.
“The rebellion is more than an individual,” Dokubo said. “In as much as he was the leader, it does not mean this is over.”
The 39-year-old Yusuf had managed to escape death on Wednesday along with some 300 followers as troops shelled his compound in the city of Maiduguri, killing about 100 people, including Yusuf’s deputy. Yusuf’s death could provoke more violence, though the Boko Haram sect, sometimes called the Nigerian Taliban, is now likely in disarray.
Security forces thought they had already written the epitaph for the sect, back in December 2007 when Nigeria’s military apparently crushed the group after it attacked police outposts in two northern states.
Jennifer Cooke, director of the Africa program at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, said “poverty, unemployment and a state authority ... from which people feel alienated” have given rise to radical groups in Nigeria, a major oil producer and Africa’s most populous nation.
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