Nigerian extremists reject ceasefire, say all kidnapped women married off – CTV Information

Haruna Umar and Michelle Faul, The Related Press

Printed Saturday, November 1, 2014 7:03AM EDT

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria — The chief of Nigeria’s Islamic extremist team Boko Haram has denied agreeing to any cease-fire with the government and said more than 200 kidnapped schoolgirls all have converted to Islam and been married off.

In a new video released late Friday night, Abubakar Shekau dashed hopes for a prisoner exchange to get the girls released.

“The issue of the girls is long forgotten because I have long ago married them off,” he said, laughing.

“In this war, there is no going back,” he said in the video received by The Associated Press in the same way as previous messages.

Nigeria’s chief of defence staff, Air Chief Marshal Alex Badeh, on Oct. 17 announced that Boko Haram had agreed to an immediate cease-fire to end a 5-year-old insurgency that has killed thousands of people and driven hundreds of thousands from their homes in northeast Nigeria.

But attacks and abductions have continued with the extremists this week seizing Mubi, a town of more than 200,000 people. Fighting also continued Friday in Vimtin, the nearby village where Badeh was born.

Shekau in August announced that Boko Haram wanted to establish an Islamic caliphate, along the lines of the IS group in Syria and Iraq. Fleeing residents have reported that hundreds of people are being detained for infractions of the extremists’ version of strict Shariah law in several towns and villages under their control.

Boko Haram’s kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls taking exams at a boarding school in the remote northeastern town of Chibok in April prompted an international campaign for their release and criticism of Nigeria’s government for not acting quickly to free them. Dozens of the girls escaped on their own in the first couple of days, but 219 remain missing.

Unconfirmed reports have indicated that the girls have been broken up into several groups and that some may have been carried across borders into Cameroon and Chad.

The government had said it had negotiated with two Boko Haram leaders in Chad, with talks hosted by President Idriss Deby, and that it used to be assured the women can be freed quickly. However Boko Haram has many factions.

Shekau’s announcement additional discredits the federal government of President Goodluck Jonathan, who on Thursday formally introduced his candidacy for elections on Feb. 14, 2015 in Africa’s most populous nation. Nigeria, with some a hundred and sixty million individuals, is split nearly equally between Muslims who dominate the north and Christians within the south. The West African nation is the largest oil producer on the continent and has its largest financial system.

Jonathan’s failure to curtail the insurgency and lots of corruption scandals should not anticipated to dim his possibilities of success. The election, although, is predicted to be essentially the most hotly contested seeing that his Folks’s Democratic Birthday party took energy after many years of defense force dictatorship resulted in 1994.

Dozens of ruling birthday celebration legislators have defected to the coalition All Progressives Congress, dropping the PDP its majority within the decrease home of Parliament. However the coalition is weakened through its incapacity to decide on a presidential candidate, and primaries in December shall be contested through three highly effective northerners who all are Muslim.

Jonathan, a Christian from a minority southern tribe, has been criticized for ignoring an unwritten birthday party rule to alternate energy between Christian and Muslim leaders, including a spiritual and ethnic dimension to the election.

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