We’ll wipe out Boko Haram – Cameroon

By Adekunle Aliyu, Ben Agande, Favour Nnabugwu, with agency report

Yaoundé — Cameroon’s President Mr Paul Biya vowed, yesterday, that his government would go after the Islamist group Boko Haram “until it is totally wiped out”.

Cameroon president Paul Biya speaking to journalists following a meeting with his French counterpart at the Elysee Palace in Paris. Cameroon’s President Paul Biya on October 13, 2014 vowed his government would go after the Islamist group Boko Haram “until it’s totally wiped out”. He made the promise as he received 10 Chinese and 17 Cameroonians freed last week after spending months as hostages of armed men thought to belong to Boko Haram, an anti-Western rebel group in Nigeria which has been increasingly making incursions into Cameroon. AFP PHOTO

His Nigerian counterpart, President Goodluck Jonathan, on his part, was confident that the activities of insurgents and other cross-border criminals will soon be drastically curtailed with the intensification of joint patrols, military operations and intelligence sharing by Nigeria and neighbouring countries as agreed by their leaders in Niamey last week.

Mr. Paul Biya, who spoke after the release of the abducted 27 hostages comprising 17 Cameroonians and 10 Chinese said: “The Cameroonian government assures you that it will ceaselessly continue to fight Boko Haram until it’s totally wiped out”.

The 27 Cameroonians and Chinese were delivered to authorities on Friday night. The government has not said how they were freed, but a security source told AFP that “a ransom” was paid and around 20 imprisoned Islamists were freed in exchange.

The Chinese were seized in May from a construction camp in Waza, near the border with Nigeria in an attack that left one Cameroonian soldier dead. The Cameroonians — including the wife of one of Cameroon’s deputy prime ministers — were abducted in July during two simultaneous assaults, also blamed on Boko Haram, in which at least 15 people died.

One of the released Cameroonians, Seiny Boukar Lamine, told state radio, “we were in these sort of huts in a pretty dense forest, it was in a savannah with big trees and a lot of brush. We slept on the ground”. He said he was held with his wife and six children.

Another former hostage Abdouraman Seini, who survived a gunshot to his hand, told VOA he and the other captives were forced to eat whatever was provided and at times went for days without water to drink.

He said they lived in miserable conditions and that they were tortured by men armed with knives and guns. “Freedom is a good thing, I pray such a thing never happens to anyone”, he said.

Abdouraman Seini added that he did not see any of the more than 200 girls from Chibok, Nigeria that Boko Haram claimed responsibility for kidnapping in April.

According to him “women are separated from men in the various detention camps run by the militants in the bush”.

Seini also told VOA he believes it is very likely Boko Haram fighters will continue their attacks because they are running out of food for the hundreds of fighters and the hundreds of captives they have.

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We’ll wipe out Boko Haram – Cameroon