UK vows to get killers of JAMBS hostages

President Goodluck Jonathan

THE United Kingdom on Sunday vowed that it would assist the Federal Government to bring to book the killers of seven foreign workers, including a British citizen, seized off a factory in Bauchi last month.

The Political and Press Secretary in the British High Commission in Abuja, Hooman Nouruzi, said in a statement that the UK was determined to work with the Nigerian government to bring the perpetrators of the killing  to justice.

“I am grateful to the Nigerian government for their unstinting help and cooperation. We are utterly determined to work with them to hold the perpetrators of this heinous act to account, and to combat the terrorism which so blights the lives of the people of Northern Nigeria and in the wider region,” the statement said.

This came even as Britain, Italy and Greece on Sunday confirmed that hostages from their countries were among the foreign construction workers killed on Saturday by the Jama’atu Ansarul Musilimina Fi Biladis Sudan.

“This was an act of cold-blooded murder, which I condemn in the strongest terms,”  Nouruzi quoted the British Foreign Secretary William Hague as saying.

The terrorist group, said to be a breakaway faction of the vilent Islamic sect, Boko Haram, which seized the foreigners in Bauchi on February 16, announced on Saturday that it had killed the hostages.

The group purportedly issued a statement in Arabic and English on an affiliate of the Sinam al-Islam network accompanied by screen shots of a video purporting to show the dead hostages. One screenshot showed a man with gun standing above several prone figures lying on the ground.

In its statement, the group said it had decided to kill the hostages, taken from the compound of a Lebanese construction company, because of attempts by Britain and Nigeria to rescue them.

“(We) announced the capture of seven Christian foreigners and warned that any attempt by force to rescue them will put their lives in danger,” the statement said.

Meanwhile, the Federal Government on Sunday still refused to comment on the killing of the foreigners.

Efforts to speak with the Special Adviser to the President on Media and Publicity, Dr. Reuben Abati, on the telephone did not yield any result as his telephone lines remained switched off on Sunday.

The Senior Special Assistant to the President on Public Affairs, Dr. Doyin Okupe, did not pick his calls when one of our correspondents called.

Spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Ogbole Ahmedu- Ode, said he had yet to be briefed so he could not comment.

The BBC quoted Hague as having said earlier that, “A British construction worker, held hostage in Nigeria since 16 February, is likely to have been killed at the hands of his captors, along with six other foreign nationals.”

The Associated Press, quoted Italy’s foreign ministry as saying that “seven foreign hostages kidnapped in northern Nigeria had been killed as claimed by Islamic extremists, the worst such foreign abduction violence to hit the turbulent West African nation in decades.”

 Greece also confirmed that one of its citizens had been “killed by Ansaru, the radical group that claimed responsibility for abducting the foreigners from northern Bauchi state in Feb. 16.”

 AP quoted the statement from the Italian Foreign Ministry as saying, “It’s an atrocious act of terrorism, against which the Italian government expresses its firmest condemnation, and which has no explanation, if not that of barbarous and blind violence.”

 Italy also denied a claim by Ansaru that the hostages were killed before or during a military operation by Nigerian and British forces, saying there was “no military intervention aimed at freeing the hostages.”

 On its part, a statement from Greece’s foreign ministry said authorities had already informed the hostage’s family.

 ‘’We note that the terrorists never communicated or formulated demands to release the hostages,” the statement read, which also denied any military raid took place.

 Ansaru previously issued a short statement saying its fighters kidnapped the foreigners February 16 from a construction company’s camp at Jama’are, a town about 200 kilometres north of Bauchi, the capital of Bauchi state.

 In the attack gunmen first assaulted a local prison and burned police trucks, authorities said. Then the attackers blew up a back fence at the construction company’s compound and took over, killing a guard in the process.

 In an online statement Saturday claiming the killings, Ansaru said it killed the hostages in part due to local Nigerian journalists reporting on the arrival of British military aircraft to Bauchi, the northern state where the abductions occurred. However, the online statement from Ansaru said the airplanes were spotted at the international airport in Abuja, the nation’s capital.

 The British Ministry of Defence said Sunday that the planes it flew to Abuja ferried Nigerian troops and equipment to Bamako, Mali. Nigerian soldiers have been sent to Mali to help French forces and Malian troops battle Islamic extremists there. The British military said it also transported Ghanaian soldiers to Mali the same way.

 The British ministry declined to offer any other comment regarding Nigerian extremist group’s claims that it killed the seven hostages. Ansaru had said it believed the planes were part of a Nigerian and British rescue mission for the abducted hostages.

 The UK has offered military support in the past in Nigeria to free hostages. In March 2012, its special forces backed a failed Nigerian military raid to free Christopher McManus, who had been abducted months earlier with Italian Franco Lamolinara from a home in Kebbi State. Both hostages were killed in that rescue attempt.

 In its statement Saturday, Ansaru also blamed the killings on a pledge by Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan to do “everything possible” to free the hostages.