| The first suggestion of a link between Islamist groups in Nigeria and Afghanistan’s Taliban extremists has emerged with a member of the Boko Haram sect that was behind a deadly uprising in July confessing to receiving military training in Afghanistan, police say.
The member of the sect known locally as Boko Haram and Taliban said he had been paid $5,000 to do the training and promised $30,000 on his return.
The uprising in northern Nigeria left some 700 people dead, mostly militants.
If confirmed it would be the first proven link between Islamists in the oil-rich country and Afghanistan.
Local people called the group Taliban because of its radical beliefs.
For years Western diplomats have feared an al-Qaeda sleeper cell might launch attacks on oil infrastructure in Nigeria, which is an increasingly large supplier to the US.
The man, 23-year-old Abdulrasheed Abubakar, was paraded before journalists in the Borno State capital Maiduguri, where the sect was based and which saw the worst violence.
The police also displayed a large cache of weapons and bomb-making equipment recovered from suspected Boko Haram members recently arrested in the northern cities of Yola and Maiduguri.
Abubakar said he converted to Islam seven months ago and decided to join the sect after buying the teachings of Boko Haram leader Mohammed Yusuf on cassette.
“It was the mood of Mohammed Yusuf’s teaching – the energy that helped me to join him,” he told the BBC’s Bilkisu Babangida in Maiduguri.
He met Yusuf two weeks after finding the sect in Maiduguri and was asked by the Boko Haram leader to go to Afghanistan.
“I spent three months in Afghanistan. I was trained as a bomb specialist.”
Abubakar said he was supposed to train five people on his return, but when he did not receive his money he escaped.
He said that during the uprising in July, when Boko Haram militants, armed mainly with machetes, launched the simultaneous attacks on police stations in different parts of the north, he was in jail in Yola.
Hundreds of sect members were killed as the security forces retaliated and controversy surrounds the death of Yusuf, who was shot after his arrest.
Police say Yusuf was killed in a shoot-out when he tried to escape, but human rights groups say it was a summary execution.
The sect said it was fighting against Western education and believed Nigeria’s government was being corrupted by Western ideas.
It wanted to see Islamic law imposed across the country.
With its large number of impoverished and devoutly Muslim young men as well as easy access to weapons fueled by endemic corruption, Nigeria may seem to be the ideal breeding ground for anti-western radicals.
But so far there has been no evidence of Osama Bin Laden’s group in Nigeria, despite several arrests by the government and two warnings from the US about potential attacks on its interests in the country in as many years.
And analysts remain sceptical about any link between Nigerian radical Muslims and global jihadists |
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