Boko Haram rejects amnesty
The Nigerian
Islamist group Boko Haram has rejected the idea of an amnesty. Last week
President Goodluck Jonathan asked a high level team to look into the
possibility of granting the militants a pardon.
The
announcement was made via an audio statement believed to be from the group’s
leader Abubakar Shekau.
In recent
years Boko Haram has carried out a campaign of violence across northern and
parts of central Nigeria killing at least 2,000 people.
According to the BBC, the group says its members are
fighting to create an Islamic state in Nigeria’s predominantly Muslim north.
Mr Shekau
said his group had done no wrong and so an amnesty would not be applicable to
them.
It was the
Nigerian government that was committing atrocities against Muslims, he said.
“Surprisingly,
the Nigerian government is talking about granting us amnesty. What wrong have
we done? On the contrary, it is we that should grant you [a] pardon,” AFP news
agency quotes him as saying in the Hausa language audio recording.
BBC Nigeria
correspondent Will Ross says that northern religious and political leaders have
been urging President Jonathan to grant an amnesty to the militants as they say
the army’s response to the insurgency is not bringing peace.
The amnesty
panel was set up by the president last week and includes senior military
representatives, presidential sources said.
The move
surprised many as President Jonathan had dismissed the idea of amnesty and
dialogue, our reporter says.
In 2009,
then-Nigerian President Musa Yar Adua granted an amnesty to thousands of
militants wreaking havoc in the oil-rich Niger Delta in the south.
The violence
fell dramatically but there are worrying warnings of further unrest in the
Delta, analysts say.
BBC
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