Islamist group leader challenges Nigeria president

The leader of a radical Islamist group has challenged the authority of Nigeria’s president in an online video, promising more attacks in a nation overcome by unrest and divided by religion, while Poland strongly condemned Wednesday recent violence targeting Christians in which 16 people have died.

“We are particularly disturbed by the fact that the difficult situation of Christians in Nigeria can be perceived in the wider context of an anti-Christian campaign in other parts of the world,” Poland’s Foreign Ministry said.

The video of Imam Abubakar Shekau cements his leadership in the group known as Boko Haram. Analysts and diplomats say the group has fractured over time, with a splinter group responsible for the majority of the assassinations and bombings carried out in its name.

It also exploits the widening mistrust those living in Nigeria’s Muslim north feel for a weak federal government run by a Christian president, who has sparked a nationwide strike and protests after removing subsidies that kept gasoline prices low.

“In the end, they said they should kill us. They kill us. They burn our houses. They burn our mosques,” Shekau says in the Hausa language of Nigeria’s north. “They didn’t even leave us. Because of that, we thought, let us protect ourselves as well.”

Boko Haram, whose name in Hausa means “Western education is sacrilege,” has carried out attacks in Nigeria’s northeast and its capital that killed at least 510 people last year alone, according to an AP count. The group is blamed by the government for killing at least 63 people in the last week, as it continues its campaign to impose strict Islamic Shariah law across the multiethnic nation of more than 160 million people.

Shekau took control of the group after a riot and security crackdown in July 2009 saw Boko Haram’s leader and about 700 others killed. Police initially claimed to have killed Shekau during that violence in Nigeria, but he emerged last year in audio and video messages just before Boko Haram began its campaign of violence.

In the 15-minute video uploaded Tuesday to YouTube, Shekau appears relaxed, wearing a camouflage bulletproof vest and sitting between two Kalashnikov rifles. He criticized President Goodluck Jonathan for speaking out about the group and hints that the group carries much more popular support across Nigeria’s impoverished north than what authorities believe.

“All these things you’ve been seeing happening, it’s Allah who has been doing it because you refuse to believe in him and you misuse his religion and because of that, the thing is more than you, Jonathan,” Shekau says. You can “meet other people who think what we’re doing is good.”

“People are talking about us, that we are a disease, a cancer, to people in Nigeria,” Shekau says. “But we are not cancer and we are not a disease. And we are not wicked people with a bad habit. If people do not know us, Allah knows us.”

The U.S. government believes Boko Haram remains in contact with two Al-Qaeda-inspired terror groups in Africa, which could account for the increasing complexity of their attacks. The Shekau video also suggests an outside influence, copying the style of other terror groups’ messages.

Muslims and Christians largely live in peace, do business with each other and intermarry in Nigeria. However, tension over Boko Haram’s attacks have seen mosques attacked in recent weeks. Tuesday, an angry mob attacked a mosque and school in southwest Nigeria, killing at least five people.

Muslim groups also denounced Boko Haram’s violence, though many in the north are angry over the high unemployment and poverty as politicians embezzle billions of dollars of the country’s oil revenues.

Meanwhile, Ghanaian security agents seized a truckload of arms on its way to crisis-torn Nigeria and arrested five people, a senior police officer in Accra said Wednesday.

“The vehicle with Coca Cola inscription was loaded with the consignment which included pump action guns, double-barrel guns and a large quantity of cartridges,” Accra Regional Police Commander Rose Bio Atinga told AFP.

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