Boko Haram (18 page)

The message was posted as the situation spiralled even further out of control. Another police station in Kano was attacked a few days after the 20 January wave of violence, while a couple of days after that, gunmen kidnapped a German engineer working for a construction firm on the outskirts of the city. The kidnapping signalled that earlier abductions of a Briton and an Italian from Kebbi in north-western Nigeria were not isolated incidents, with yet another new and different phase of the insurgency ahead. In the case of the German, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb would at one point claim to be holding him and demand the release of the
wife of an Islamist leader in exchange for his freedom, signalling murky links between AQIM and kidnappers in northern Nigeria. He would eventually be killed by his abductors during a raid to free him in Kano.
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There were also more bombings over the following months, including a suicide attack on the Abuja office of one of Nigeria's most prominent newspapers in April 2012.

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Blood covered the floor of the bathroom in the unguarded and now empty house, its walls pocked with bullet holes, children from the neighbourhood entering and exiting at will. Crowds were still gathering outside on the morning of 9 March 2012, intrigued by what had happened the previous day in the quiet residential neighbourhood of unpaved roads and modest houses in the city of Sokoto, the home of Nigeria's highest-ranking Muslim spiritual leader and the former capital of Usman Dan Fodio's caliphate. They spoke of a chaotic raid that sparked a shoot-out, with the men inside refusing to surrender and around 100 Nigerian soldiers, who had been supported by British special forces, surrounding the house. The soldiers were pursuing them because they had been holding two Western hostages, Franco Lamolinara, a 48-year-old Italian, and Chris McManus, who was British and 28. The two men were kidnapped almost a year earlier, in May 2011, while working on a construction project in Kebbi state in north-western Nigeria, near the border with Niger. At one point during the intense gun battle at the house in Sokoto, according to some of the residents, Nigerian soldiers asked people in the neighbourhood to bring them old tyres. When they did, the soldiers set them alight and tossed them over the wall of the complex, a single-storey series of structures with a zinc roof and a courtyard. They wanted to smoke the kidnappers out.
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Unlike AQIM, which had collected millions of dollars in ransom payments by abducting Westerners, Boko Haram had not yet used kidnapping as a tactic. Abductions were in general rare in northern Nigeria, unlike in parts of the south, where ransom kidnappings had become big business. That began to change when
a group of Boko Haram members seemed to break off and create their own faction, called Jama'atu Ansarul Muslimina Fi Biladis Sudan, or Vanguard for the Aid of Muslims in Black Africa.
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It would later come to be known simply as Ansaru, and it would be blamed for the kidnappings of the British and Italian engineers and a number of other abductions.

Several theories were offered as to why they had split, with some arguing that they had grown frustrated with the killing of civilians and particularly fellow Muslims by Shekau's Boko Haram. Others reasoned that the dissidents wanted to more forcefully pursue an international agenda, in line with Al-Qaeda affiliates in northern Africa and elsewhere. A third reason put forth was more opportunistic: those in Ansaru had the connections and the will to try to create a kidnapping market in northern Nigeria and wanted to profit from it as their extremist colleagues elsewhere had done. It is certainly possible that the true story was a combination of all of those factors. Some experts said Ansaru's leader, or one of them, may have been Khalid al-Barnawi, long a Boko Haram figure who may have run a training camp with AQIM in Algeria and had some form of relationship with the Algerian extremist Mokhtar Belmokhtar.
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The US government would later label al-Barnawi a ‘global terrorist' along with two other Nigerian extremists: Shekau and Abubakar Adam Kambar, who was also said to be linked to AQIM. Nigeria's military claimed Kambar was Boko Haram's main link with Al-Qaeda and Al-Shebab in Somalia.
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How separate Boko Haram and Ansaru truly are has been heavily debated, and it seems the two overlap, particularly when it comes to their foot soldiers. It has been described by some as an umbrella-like arrangement that includes both Boko Haram and Ansaru.

After the May 2011 abductions of the Briton and Italian, there had been no word from the kidnappers or the victims for months, fuelling speculation that they had been carried out by Islamist extremists whose agenda was more complicated than simply collecting a ransom. Abductions in the Niger Delta in the south
had tended to follow a pattern, with a ransom demanded shortly after the kidnapping and victims usually released unharmed after it was paid, often following negotiations to lower the price. The silence surrounding McManus and Lamolinara would be broken in August 2011, when a video emerged showing the two men blindfolded and on their knees. They were forced to read a statement in which they said their abductors were from Al-Qaeda and that their governments should meet the kidnappers' demands. The demands were, however, not listed – a clear set of demands would in fact never be issued, according to the British government – and after the appearance of the video, there was another long period of silence with no word on the victims' health, where they may be located and what exactly their kidnappers wanted. A second video emerged in December 2011 in which gunmen threatened to execute McManus.
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Britain's participation in a potential rescue operation had taken root when Prime Minister David Cameron visited Nigeria and held talks with President Jonathan in July 2011. The two men discussed the hostages during the visit, ‘and as a result agreed a package of UK support for Nigeria's counter-terrorism efforts', Britain's defence secretary, Philip Hammond, would tell the UK House of Commons. ‘As part of that package, a sustained operation was conducted to identify members of the group responsible for the kidnapping.'
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By March 2012, after the arrest of three people accused of having conducted surveillance on the victims before their abduction, authorities had discovered that the man behind the plot was someone named Abu Mohammed. Nigeria's Department of State Services (DSS), a secret police and intelligence unit, described Mohammed as the leader of a faction of Boko Haram.
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A Nigerian security source told a reporter for my news agency that Mohammed had links to both Boko Haram and AQIM and had masterminded the kidnapping with the aim of collecting ransom money, which would be used to finance more operations.
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Nigerian authorities learned that Mohammed's hideout was located in the city of Zaria in north-central Nigeria, several hundred miles away from Birnin Kebbi, the site of the kidnapping. On 7 March, the authorities launched a raid on the hideout. The DSS said the raid was carried out while Mohammed and his faction were holding a meeting of its ‘shura council', or consultative body, but that description may imply a more sophisticated level of organisation than the group actually had. During the raid, a number of gang members were believed to be killed, while five were arrested, including Mohammed, who had been shot and injured in the gunfight. A soldier had his throat slit. Those who were arrested, according to the DSS, then began providing information to the authorities that would lead to the raid in Sokoto. The information was said to include a warning: Those keeping watch over the two hostages had been instructed to kill them ‘in the event of any envisaged threat'. The British government would decide a rescue attempt was not only necessary, but that it also required the backing of its special forces, who would participate in the operation.

‘After months of not knowing where they were being held, we received credible information about their location', Cameron said later in a televised address. ‘A window of opportunity arose to secure their release. We also had reason to believe that their lives were under imminent and growing danger.'

The British government has never said publicly how many members of its elite Special Boat Service were dispatched for the raid, though reports in the British media put the number at around a dozen and perhaps as many as 20. There were also reports of the commandos being stationed in Nigeria for up to a couple weeks before the operation, and British intelligence operatives at one point may have managed to begin listening in on the kidnap gang's phone calls.
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On the night of 7 March, one of those arrested – the man who killed the soldier, according to Nigerian authorities – led security forces to Sokoto, but any element of surprise may have
been sabotaged by the military itself. Before the security team's arrival the next morning, Nigeria's military decided it would have to search and cordon off the neighbourhood where the hostages were believed to be held to make sure the kidnappers could not escape ahead of time.
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Residents also said they saw two helicopters hovering overhead in the morning, which would obviously raise suspicions as well.

British forces became concerned that the Nigerian soldiers deployed throughout the neighbourhood had tipped the kidnappers off and decided they could wait no longer. It seems that, before that time, a final decision had not been made to go ahead with the raid since the Italian government had not been notified. The raid would begin shortly before noon, with the British government having given its final approval at 11.15 a.m.
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British commandos were among those who entered the walled-in compound and would be faced with gunfire from someone with an AK-47. They would spot and kill one of the gang members almost immediately after entering, but could hear more gunshots, except now they were muffled and seemed to come from inside a room. Two men then escaped, climbing a ladder over the wall. This all happened within six minutes after the start of the raid.

The soldiers then searched the premises, and after arriving in one section covered by tarpaulin, they went inside. When they entered a room with two beds, they spotted a Manchester United shirt that resembled the one Chris McManus wore in videos released by the kidnappers.

‘They called out for Franco and Chris but received no reply', Detective Chief Inspector Grant Mallon said when reporting the findings of a British inquest into the death of McManus. ‘To the right there was a metal door to a toilet and they noticed there were bullet holes to it, and the team noticed there were 7.62mm munitions and cases on the floor. The door was partially open and when the soldiers looked inside they could see two white males on the floor and they immediately recognised them as Chris and
Franco. Chris was lying to the left of the toilet. Both men had visible gunshot wounds. It appears they were killed fairly quickly into the engagement.'

The inquest found that the two men could not have been hit by the rescue team's bullets because those that killed them were a different type. McManus had been shot a total of six times, but died from a single gunshot wound to the head, while Lamolinara was hit four times and also died from a bullet to the head.
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They were eventually able to carry out the bodies, but the operation was far from over, however. At some point, a fierce firefight broke out between Nigerian soldiers and the kidnappers who remained. Residents said the gunfire lasted up to seven hours, though Britain's defence secretary said it was 90 minutes. According to residents I spoke to in the neighbourhood the day after the raid, there were about 100 Nigerian troops as well as a tank. As the gun battle raged, soldiers asked residents for the old tyres that they set on fire and tossed over the wall. A huge hole could be seen in one of the walls the next day, and residents said the tank had fired a shell into it. Three members of the gang were killed and ‘none were taken alive', according to Defence Secretary Hammond.
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Nigerian authorities said the wife of one of the gang members was wounded by a bullet and treated at hospital.

Every resident I spoke to claimed they did not know who occupied the house or that the hostages were being held there. The local chief of the Mabera neighbourhood, Umar Bello, told me the same and added that he did not believe the kidnappers were members of Boko Haram. ‘It is just kidnappers. It's about money', he said. ‘Their major priority is money, and once they don't get the money, they have nothing to lose.'

On the day after the raid, with dozens of people circulating through the compound, by then picked clean by looters, and viewing the blood-splattered bathroom where the men were killed, Nigerian authorities had apparently had enough. Three truckloads of agents, including those wearing DSS helmets, arrived in the
afternoon and began firing their guns into the air, forcing the crowd to scatter.

The kidnappings would have repercussions beyond Nigeria. It would spark a diplomatic dispute between Britain and Italy, with Italian President Giorgio Napolitano saying that ‘the behaviour of the British government, which did not inform or consult with Italy on the operation that it was planning, really is inexplicable'.
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Britain said there had not been time, since there was a need to act urgently. Underlying the dispute may have been differences in how each country handled such situations. Britain refuses to pay ransoms, while Italy has been willing to do so.
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