A security expert, Yemi Akpang, a guest on Channels Television program Sunrise Daily, yesterday has stated that some of the foreigners kidnapped by Boko Haram were/are actually handlers sent by sponsors to train the insurgents on bomb making, munitions and other terror tactics.
He said, “They (terrorists) would fake the kidnapping, take him to their camps (where he would) train them (on) how to assemble bombs, how to handle weapons … and after about 9 months to one year, they would release the person.”
“It is possible that it is a normal kidnapping case but 95 percent of the time such people are weapons instructors.”
Over the past few years several foreigners including a French family, and a French Priest have been kidnapped by insurgents. Several have also been reportedly killed in military rescue operations.
Here is a report on kidnappings by Boko Haram from ThinkAfricaPress.
On 12 May 2011, British national, Chris McManus, and his Italian compatriot, Franco Lamolinara were abducted from their residence in the northern Nigeria city of Birnin Kebbi. The victims, who were engineers of the B. Stabilini construction company, were executed by their captors on March 2012 in the city of Sokoto following a failed rescue attempt by Nigerian and British Special Forces. Their abduction, which the British Foreign Office linked to Boko Haram, marked the first kidnapping of foreigners in Nigeria at the hands of Islamist militants.
Less than eight months later, German engineer Edgar Fritz Raupach became the second foreigner to be kidnapped by the Islamist insurgents when he was seized in the northern city of Kano. Similarly to Lamolinara and McManaus, Raupach was executed during a failed rescue attempt in May 2012. Although al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) claimed Raupach’s abduction, analysts such as Martin Ewi from South Africa’s Institute for Security Studies (ISS) claimed that Boko Haram facilitated the kidnapping in return for training they had received from AQIM in Mali.
Although Boko Haram was already engaging in kidnapping, the threat to foreign expatriates was arguably only truly realised on 19 December 2012 when Ansaru, a group believed to be a breakaway faction of Boko Haram, orchestrated one of the most daring and well-executed kidnapping operations seen in northern Nigeria. In the attack, dozens of its militants seized French engineer, Francis Colump, from a guarded compound in the town of Rimi, located in Nigeria’s Katsina state. Less than 24 hours after the abduction, Ansaru claimed responsibility for the kidnapping which it said was retaliation for France banning women from wearing a full-face veil in public and the French government’s planned intervention in against Islamists in northern Mali.
On 19 February 2013, the group claimed responsibility for the kidnapping of seven further foreign expatriate workers, employed by the Lebanese-owned Setraco construction company, in the Jama’are local government area in Bauchi State. On 10 March 2013, the group released a video claiming that it had executed the hostages in response to a government attempt to free the hostages.
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