At least 44 suspected members of Boko Haram who were arrested during a recent operation against the group have been found dead in their prison cell in Chad after apparently being poisoned, the country's chief prosecutor has announced. The prisoners were found dead on Thursday, Youssouf Tom said on television, and an autopsy carried out on four of the dead prisoners revealed traces of a lethal substance that had caused […]
At least 92 soldiers from Chad have been killed in the deadliest-ever attack by the Boko Haram armed group on the country's military forces, President Idriss Deby said on Tuesday. "We lost 92 of our soldiers, non-commissioned officers and officers," the president said of the attack overnight on Sunday in Boma. "It’s the first time we have lost so many men," he added, after visiting the site of the incident […]
The Nigerian military says it has rescued 149 women and children abducted by the armed group Boko Haram in the country's northeast. Onyema Nwachuku, army spokesman, said on Sunday the freed captives included 54 women and 95 children, according to the NAN news agency. "The rescued hostages are currently receiving medical attention," he said in a statement, adding that they would be "profiled after the medical screening". The rescues took […]
Nigeria’s government is in talks with Islamist militant group Boko Haram about a possible ceasefire with the ultimate aim of securing a permanent cessation of hostilities, the country’s information minister said on Sunday. It is the first time in years the government has said it is talking to Boko Haram about a ceasefire in an insurgency that has killed tens of thousands of people since 2009. President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration […]
Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari has vowed to free the only Dapchi schoolgirl believed to still be in Boko Haram captivity. In a tweet Thursday, the President said the government will not relent in its efforts to have Leah Sharibu reunited with her parents, as it has done for others. Her father, Nathan, says he was told by the other girls released that Leah, 15, was left behind in a Boko […]
When Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari took office three years ago, eradicating the“mindless, godless” militants of Boko Haram and rescuing the hundreds of women and children they held captive was one of the main pledges in his inaugural address. Another mass abduction of schoolgirls in the dusty and remote northeast has exposed how little progress has been made. It also shows that security is a major weakness for the former military […]
Suspected Boko Haram insurgents have kidnapped 10 members of a geological research team from the University of Maiduguri in northeast Nigeria, the state oil company, which contracted the work, said on Wednesday. The Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) has been surveying for more than a year for what it says could be vast oil reserves in the Lake Chad Basin, a region wracked by Boko Haram's eight-year insurgency, which has […]
Suspected Boko Haram fighters have killed at least nine people and abducted as many as 40 others in south-east Niger, according to local officials. The gunmen late on Sunday attacked a village in Kablewa town near the southeastern Niger city of Diffa, close to the border with Nigeria, authorities said on Monday. They killed eight young people and an elderly man, Kablewa Mayor Abari Elh Daouda told the DPA news […]
At least 82 of the nearly 200 schoolgirls who were still missing after a mass Boko Haram abduction in northeast Nigeria in 2014 have been freed, a government official has told Al Jazeera. The girls were in the town of Banki, close to the Nigerian-Cameroonian border, after their release on Saturday, Al Jazeera's Ahmed Idris, reporting from Nigeria's capital, Abuja, said. "We are told that 82 of the Chibok have […]
VOC became the first Muslim radio station in South Africa when a special events license was granted to the station in Ramadan/January 1995. Subsequent temporary broadcast licenses were granted, permitting the station to broadcast for 24 hours.
