Nigeria had in the past shunned pleas by Western countries led by United States of America, to accept the classification of Boko Haram as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation, FTO, but recent events may mean Nigeria will have no choice than to accept the Isamist sect as an FTO.
Interior Minister, Comrade Abba Moro, however, said there were hopes that the hostages reportedly killed at the weekend, were still alive.
Meanwhile, the images of the slain hostages in a video released on YouTube showed some of the corpses of the seven hostages. According to the Associated Press, “the images matched the still images of hostages released by the group when they claimed the killings.”
Interior Minister, Abba Moro, told the BBC’s Hausa language radio service that “those nations said it was ‘likely’ that their citizens had died in the attack. We hope they’re alive.”
The hostages, one each from Italy, Britain and Greece and four from Lebanon, were working for a Lebanese firm, Setraco.
In the video, a gunman stands on sand, holding a rifle near what appears to be dead bodies. A later shot in the video showed three male corpses, one of whom appeared to have been killed by a gunshot wound to the head from a high-powered weapon.
The video had no sound. An accompanying caption for the video in Arabic calls it: “The killing of seven Christian hostages in Nigeria.” A second caption in Arabic and English stated: “In the name of Allah Most Beneficent Most Merciful,” Reuters reported.
Ansaru fighters kidnapped the foreigners February 16, from a camp of the construction company, Setraco at Jama’are, a town 200 kilometres north of Bauchi, the capital of Bauchi State. In the attack, gunmen first assaulted a local prison and burned police trucks, authorities said. Then the attackers blew up a back fence at the construction company’s compound and took over, killing a guard in the process, witnesses and police said.
God help nigeria
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