Post date: Mar 19, 2013 3:35:5 PM
At a ceremony in Lagos for visiting Lebanese President Michel Suleiman,Nigeria's President Goodluck Jonathan says some of the seven foreign hostages believed to have been killed by Islamist group Ansaru earlier this month might still be alive.
LAGOS, NIGERIA (MARCH 18, 2013) (CHANNELS TV) - Nigeria's President Goodluck Jonathan said on Monday (March 18) that some of the seven hostages believed to have been killed by Islamist group Ansaru this month might actually still be alive and the government has been working to rescue them.
Ansaru said earlier this month it had killed the seven foreign construction workers it had been holding since February, posting a video of what it said was their bodies on the internet, in what would be the deadliest single attack on foreigners in Nigeria since the 1960's Biafra war.Italy and Greece confirmed that a Briton, an Italian, a Greek and four Lebanese abducted in northern Nigeria's Bauchi state had been killed by their captors.
Britain said only that it was likely they had been killed, whereas Nigerian authorities had so far not commented.
"Analysis of that information does not really give us a conclusive position so, we discuss it every day. We really suspect that some probably have died either from health or related causes or direct killing, but we still believe that not all the seven. Because even the release on social media did not really show the seven, so we are still working on it. I briefed my colleague, the president of Lebanon, that we are still working on it and we'll get to the root. Even if they have been killed, I insisted that we must get their corpses and we've been working with friendly nations, especially the United Kingdom and others, to see that these people are arrested," President Jonathan Goodluck said at a ceremony in Lagos for visiting Lebanese President Michel Suleiman.
The kidnappings highlighted the growing risk posed by violent Islamist groups inNigeria to Western interests.
Western governments fear ties with groups elsewhere in the region are drawing Nigerian Islamists towards a more explicitly anti-Western agenda, like that of al Qaeda's north African wing, especially since France launched an operation to push them out of northern Mali in January.
Ansaru killed a British and Italian hostage in northwest Nigeria during a failed rescue mission by British and Nigerian forces a year ago.
They said that the latest killings were because of a rescue attempt, although Italyand Greece denied there was any such attempt.
The group claimed responsibility for the kidnapping in December of a French national, still missing.
Nigerian authorities are still looking for a French family of seven kidnapped innorthern Cameroon and moved over the border by militants who said they were from the main Islamist insurgency Boko Haram.