Nigeria’s Boko Haram wants to kidnap Christian women, says spokesman

LAGOS(BM): A Nigeria spokesman for the Islamist militant group Boko Haram told Bikyamasr.com on Tuesday afternoon that the group has plans to begin kidnapping Christian women in a push to “liquidate” the religious group from the country.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, the spokesman said that “we are going to put into action new efforts to strike fear into the Christians of the power of Islam by kidnapping their women.”

He added that they would not sexually assault or harm the women, “but we will demand as ransom that the families leave our Islamic areas.”

The spokesman did not elaborate on when or how this new “campaign of terror” would take place, but it is striking fears in many Christians in the country.

“Kidnapping is very serious and dangerous. After all the bombings and violence, I don’t know what we would do,” Markos, a Christian living in Lagos, told Bikyamasr.com.

According to the same spokesman, speaking via telephone from northern Nigeria on Sunday, the group “will launch a number of attacks, coordinated and part of the plan to eradicate Christians from certain parts of the country.”

Boko Haram have taken responsibility for a number of bomb attacks on Christian churches across the country since a Christmas Day bombing left dozens of people killed.

The government has promised to crackdown on the group and has deployed military units across the country in an attempt to curtail the Islamic group’s activities, arresting and killing a number of members in recent weeks.

But the spokesman said the government “cannot be prepared for what is to come.”

He said, without giving specific details, “we will create so much effort to end the Christian presence in our push to have a proper Islamic state that the Christians won’t be able to stay.”

On Friday, the group reportedly killed three of its own members late on Friday in the northeastern state of Maiduguri, police and military sources confirmed.

“This was part of our planning and it is unfortunate,” said the spokesman.

The explosion in the Kaleri suburb of the northern city on Friday destroyed a house and dismembered the three Islamist sect members, Lieutenant Colonel Hassan Mohammed of the special military unit in Maiduguri said.

Other items recovered at the scene included remote control devices, wrist watch timers, metallic drums and copies of the Qur’an, he said.

The sect converts homes into bomb-making factories for attacks, the spokesman said.

As well as in Maiduguri, there have been accidental and fatal explosions in suspected Boko Haram bomb-making factories in the northern cities of Damaturu and Kaduna in recent months.

Violence blamed on the militant group, who has called for an Islamic state in Nigeria, has since mid-2009 claimed more than 1,000 lives, including more than 300 this year alone, according to rights groups.

BM