Posted by
InchDeep on Sunday, May 11, 2008 12:19:48 AM
From smh.com.au.
Al-Qaeda Islamist militants have renewed their threat to bomb
targets in Nigeria, Africa's top oil producer, a newspaper reported
quoting the national police chief.
The United States embassy in Nigeria said last September the country
was at risk of "terrorist attack" and Osama bin Laden once named the
world's eighth biggest oil exporter as ripe for jihad or Islamic holy
war.
"The al-Qaeda network has threatened to send time bombs to Nigeria
... CPs (commissioners of police) of all the commands should be on the
alert and ensure that these items (bombs) do not pass through their
end," the Punch newspaper quoted Inspector General of Police Mike Okiro
as saying.
He gave no details of what the targets might be, but he told a group
of senior officers that intelligence reports showed the threat was real.
A number of suspected jihadists have been arrested by police and the
State Security Services (SSS) in recent years, but the cases have
dragged on in the courts and there have been no convictions. No
conclusive evidence of al-Qaeda's presence in Nigeria has been made
public.
Five Islamist militants with suspected links to al-Qaeda are on
trial in the capital Abuja for plotting attacks on government targets
in Africa's most populous country.
The men were arrested in November by the SSS in mainly Muslim
northern Nigeria. Three of them have also been charged with training in
Algeria with the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) between
2005 and August 2007.
The GSPC renamed itself al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in January 2007.
The charge sheet said the five militants, all in their early 30s,
"did conspire to commit terrorist acts," and said three of them trained
in Algeria "with intent to attack government facilities and cause
insurrection in Nigeria".
Another charge said the militants had an AK 47 rifle, ammunition,
dynamite, fertiliser "and 11 explosive devices" which they planned to
use to attack government facilities and installations in the southern
cities of Lagos and Ibadan.
Nigeria's 140 million population is roughly equally split between
Christians and Muslims. The two groups usually live side by side
peacefully, but there are occasional outbreaks of sectarian conflicts.
Tensions heightened in 2000 after 12 mainly Islamic northern states
began a stricter enforcement of sharia, alienating sizeable Christian
minorities. Thousands were killed in sporadic riots across the country.