The islamist group Boko Haram is preparing to
announce a list of key militants that it wants released in exchange for its
schoolgirl hostages.
Sources close to the group said that an
Islamic cleric from north will be authorised to negotiate on its
behalf with the federal government, and to seek a freed prisoner for every one
of the kidnapped girls.
The name of the cleric involved and of the
key commanders to be freed is expected to be revealed later today.
The group will give the cleric "clear
terms of reference" for how it wants the negotiations to be conducted, and
will also spell out the practical details of how it would set the girls free.
As well as senior commanders, the list of
prisoners to be freed is expected to include a number of militants' relatives
who have been detained by FG to put pressure on the group's
leadership.
Details of the proposed deal were revealed on
Tuesday night by a source close to some of the militants' families in the
northern city of Maiduguri, where Boko Haram first started in the 1990s.
It came as the FG appeared
to be backing away from its original insistence that it would not negotiate,
with Taminu Turaki, the minister for special duties, saying on Tuesday that
it would open to out "dialogue on any issue".
It was learnt from a source that: "The
group are about to name a cleric who they will mandate to talk to the
government. They will give him clear terms of reference, including a list of
the members they want release, and details of how they will free the girls.
"The list will include personal
relations who have been detained, but also top members of the group. In total,
the numbers to be released will probably be equal to the number of the girls
currently held."
Details of the group's demands follow the
release of a video tape on Monday in which Boko Haram's leader, Abubakar
Shekau, paraded the schoolgirls before a camera and demanded a mass prisoner
swap for his "brethren" in jails. The girls, believed to
number around 220 in total, were kidnapped from a school in Chibok, north-east
Nigeria, a month ago.
While the FG has publicly
insisted that it will not negotiate with the kidnappers, some believe that in
practice a prisoner swap may be inevitable given the sheer difficulty of
freeing the captives by force.
The group, which is known for its
ruthlessness, would not hesitate to start slaughtering its captives at the
first sign of any rescue attempt, making it difficult even for British or
American special forces to free the girls without considerable bloodshed. The
hostages are also now thought to have been split up into several groups, and if
a rescue attempt was led against one, it would likely lead to immediate
reprisals against another.
On Tuesday, Brigadier Ivan Jones, part of the
British military team sent to advise the Nigerian government, said: "No
one should underestimate the scale and complexity of this incident and
environment."
However, freeing Boko Haram fighters could
involve putting men responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people back on
the streets.
One senior militant currently in jail is
Kabiru Sokoto, who was sentenced to life with hard labour last year for masterminding
the bombing of a church outside Abuja that killed 44 people on Christmas Day
2011.
Another group of detained Boko Haram suspects
is a gang accused of the kidnapping and killing of Chris McManus, 28, a British
engineer who was abducted along with an Italian colleague, Franco Lamolinara,
in northern Nigeria in May 2011. The pair were killed by their captors during a
rescue attempt ten months later by a joint force of Nigerian troops and British
special forces.
The eight men were arrested by state security
police not along after the kidnapping, which was allegedly carried out on the
orders Khalid al-Barnawi, the leader of an al-Qaeda affiliated Boko Haram
faction called Ansaru. Both al-Barnawi and Shekau were designed by the US as
terrorists in June 2012, and while the two are known have had fallings out,
they are understood to have made amends.
In the past, a dialogue and amnesty committee
set up by the Nigerian government has brokered the release of a number of Boko
Haram detainees, mostly relatives of fighters still at large who were detained
to put pressure on the fighters themselves.
Among those released last year was Shekau's
wife and children, who were detained during a raid in December 2012 in which
Shekau was injured but escaped. While the amnesty committee has always insisted
that the releases were humanitarian gestures, many suspect they were in fact
the result of secret deals with Shekau, who is known to have kidnapped a number
of police and soldiers in revenge for his wife being taken.
Discussion over how to respond to the
prisoner swap demand came as the governor of Borno state where the girls were abducted from
met with groups campaigning for the hostages' freedom at his residence in
Abuja.
Source:Telegraph uk
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