Nigeria: 44 people sentenced for financing the jihadist group Boko Haram
The country has resumed trials, suspended for seven years, against more than 1,000 people suspected of having links to the terrorist group that has been waging an insurgency since 2009 in an attempt to establish a caliphate.
Nigeria sentenced 44 Boko Haram jihadists to prison terms of up to 30 years on Saturday for financing terrorist activities, a government agency said. The convicts were among 54 suspects tried in special civil courts in the eastern city of Kainji, Abu Michael, spokesman for Nigeria's Counter-Terrorism Center, said in a statement. " The verdicts handed down in the trials resulted in prison terms ranging from 10 to 30 years, all with hard labor ," he said.
Nigeria this week resumed trials, suspended for seven years, against more than 1,000 people suspected of having links to the Boko Haram group, which has been waging an insurgency since 2009 to establish a caliphate. " With these latest convictions, Nigeria has now recorded a total of 785 cases related to terrorist financing and other terrorism-related offenses ," the statement said.
Skip the adThe Nigerian military's 16-year campaign to crush jihadists in the northeast has left more than 40,000 dead and some two million displaced, according to the United Nations. The violence has also spread to neighboring countries such as Cameroon, Chad, and Niger.
In October 2017, Nigeria began mass trials of Islamist rebels, more than eight years after the violence began. Over a five-month period, 200 jihadist fighters were sentenced to terms ranging from “ the death penalty and life imprisonment to prison terms of 20 to 70 years ,” Michael said. These sentences were handed down for attacks on women and children, the destruction of places of worship, the murder of civilians, and the kidnapping of women and children.
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