Report: Nigeria Arrests 400 In Massive Raid For Funding Boko Haram

About 400 persons have been arrested for allegedly funding Boko Haram terrorists.

The series of arrests were made in Kano, Borno, Abuja, Lagos, Sokoto, Adamawa, Kaduna and Zamfara, Daily Trust reports.

In November 2020, there were reports of how six Nigerians were facing prison terms of 10 years to life after a federal appeals court in the United Arab Emirates upheld their convictions for funding the terrorist group, Boko Haram.

The accused were initially tried and convicted in 2019 following their arrest in 2017.

The court in Abu Dhabi therefore sentenced Surajo Abubakar Muhammad and Saleh Yusuf Adamu to life in prison. Ibrahim Ali Alhassan, AbdurRahman Ado Musa, Bashir Ali Yusuf and Muhammad Ibrahim Isa were each given a ten-year sentence.

According to a Daily Trust report, the court judgement said between 2015 and 2016, the accused transferred $782,000 from Dubai to Nigeria to benefit Boko Haram.

However, in the latest development, the newspaper said in Kano, a major focus for the operation, traders at the foreign exchange open market in Wapa, Fagge Local Government, were picked up on March 9, 15th and 16th.

It said some of the BDC operators arrested in the state include Baba Usaini, Abubakar Yellow (Amfani), Yusuf Ali Yusuf (Babangida), Ibrahim Shani, Auwal Fagge, and Muhammad Lawan Sani, a gold dealer.

Those arrested are reportedly being kept in military and Department of State Services facilities in Abuja and other places.

Four of the arrested BDC operators were related to two persons jailed in Dubai last year on similar charges.

The operation was said to have received presidential nod last year, and approval by President Muhammadu Buhari for the exercise to be conducted out of the established bureaucracy.

“Because this is economic warfare against the insurgents and other militant groups, the president, when approving the operation directed that the Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit take the lead as the country’s financial intelligence powerhouse.

“With the presidential approval, a task team was composed made up of personally selected senior officers who were deployed under the DIA to carry out the special assignment,” a senior government official told the newspaper.

According to the source, about 19 Bureau De Change centres owned by persons with “direct connection with Boko Haram” were uncovered, while over N300 billion was found to have been pumped into the funding of terrorism in the country.