Boko Haram recruited three local gangs in northwest Nigeria to kidnap hundreds of schoolboys on its behalf, security and local sources said on Wednesday.
The militant group has claimed responsibility for the attack on Friday last week that targeted a secondary school in the town of Kankara, in Katsina state.
However, sources said that the operation was carried out on Boko Haram’s orders by a notorious local gangster called Awwalun Daudawa.
Photo: AP
The 43-year-old worked in collaboration with Idi Minorti and Dankarami, two other crime chiefs with strong local followings, they said.
Criminal gangs, known locally as “bandits,” have terrorized communities in northwest Nigeria for years and experts have said that militants would attempt to forge an alliance with them.
Daudawa “was an armed robber and a cattle rustler before he turned to gunrunning, bringing in weapons from Libya, where he had received training, and selling them to bandits,” a security source said.
“Over time, he forged an alliance with Boko Haram and became their gunrunner, taking weapons the group seizes from the Nigerian security forces in raids and ambushes, and selling them to bandits for a cut,” the source said.
“Awwalun Daudawa was spotted in the forest in the Kankara area, where he recently relocated and there were reports that he was planning something, but it was not clear what it was,” the source added.
Another source with intimate knowledge of “bandit” activities in Katsina and Zamfara states said: “From available information, Awwalun Daudawa was ordered by Abubakar Shekau to kidnap the schoolboys, and he enlisted the help of Idi Minorti and Dankarami.”
“After the children were taken, they went across the border into Zamfara state and split them among different gangs ‘for safekeeping,’” the source said. “Some of the gangs have been in touch with the authorities for the release of the boys.”
The attack occurred hundreds of kilometers from Boko Haram’s stronghold in northeast Nigeria, where it launched a brutal insurgency a decade ago.
The militants made a claim of responsibility in a four-minute audio, sent to Agence France-Presse through the same channel as previous messages from the group.
“I am Abubakar Shekau and our brothers are behind the kidnapping in Katsina,” said the voice in the recording, resembling that of the elusive Boko Haram leader.
Shekau was behind the 2014 abduction of 276 schoolgirls in Chibok that sparked global outrage.
However, another source said that there is an ongoing peace pact between bandits and the Zamfara state government, which the bandits do not want to breach.
“They have been under intense pressure to release the boys,” the source added.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
RSS