Nigerian police thwart attack targeting US, British embassies

Nigerian security officials said yesterday they have thwarted plans by Islamic State group-linked Boko Haram members to attack the embassies of the United States and Britain. A statement by the Department of State Services said that late last month it broke up a ring that had “perfected plans to attack” the embassies along with “other Western interests” in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja. The statement said five suspects who had been based in Benue state and the Federal Capital Territory were arrested. It gave no further details, and officials with the department could not immediately be reached.

The US embassy did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The State Department on April 5 issued an updated travel warning for Nigeria, warning that Boko Haram has targeted government installations and other venues in the past in the Federal Capital Territory and elsewhere. One faction of Boko Haram is allied with the Islamic State group. Nigeria’s president late last year declared the Boko Haram insurgency “crushed,” but its fighters continue to threaten the vast region around Lake Chad in defiance of a multinational force. It has increasingly used children, especially girls, as suicide bombers. Boko Haram’s seven-year Islamic uprising has killed more than 20,000 people and driven 2.6 million from their homes, with millions facing starvation.

Using kids as bombers

Radical Islamic militants from Boko Haram are increasingly forcing children to carry out bombings, with the number of attacks since January already nearly reaching the total for all of last year, according to a report released yesterday by the UN children’s agency. UNICEF says at least 117 attacks have been carried out by youth in the Lake Chad basin region since 2014, with nearly 80 percent of the bombs strapped to girls, who were sometimes drugged before their missions. The very sight of children near marketplaces and checkpoints is sparking fear, according to Marie-Pierre Poirier, UNICEF’s regional director for West and Central Africa. As a result, nearly 1,500 children were detained last year across Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger and Chad. “These children are victims, not perpetrators,” Poirier said. “Forcing or deceiving them into committing such horrific acts is reprehensible.” Children have been used to carry out 27 attacks in the first three months of this year, after 30 such attacks last year.

The new report coincides with this week’s third anniversary of the mass abduction of Chibok schoolgirls by Boko Haram, which has pledged allegiance to the Islamic State. The mass abduction of 276 girls from a boarding school in Nigeria in 2014 mobilized an international campaign to find and free the girls, many of whom were forced into marriages with fighters and became pregnant. Dozens quickly escaped, and 21 were freed in October through negotiations with Boko Haram mediated by the Swiss government and the International Committee of the Red Cross. — Agencies