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Boko Haram videographer surrenders
A videographer working with the terror group, Boko Haram, has surrendered to government officials in Borno State, Northeast Nigeria, a security source said.
The videographer, whose name is yet to be disclosed, is currently being held in a government facility alongside hundreds of other repentant terrorists.
“We now have one of the top videographers that used to record the Boko Haram videos in our custody,” said the top Borno State Government official.
“He surrendered himself to our troops and he came out with all his gadgets including laptops and sophisticated cameras. He is present with us and seriously supports us with Intel on how to get others to come out and surrender as well.”
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The source members of the JAS faction of Boko Haram are turning in themselves daily. “As it is now, we have over 790 real fighters that are currently in our custody after they had voluntarily surrendered,” the official said.
The Nigerian military had last week said over 8000 Boko Haram fighters and their families had surrendered to the troops in Borno and other states in the Northeast.
The source, however, clarified that “not all that surrendered are real fighters of Boko Haram.”
“When the Boko Haram insurgents surrendered they came out with many other persons like their wives and children, like farmers who were forced to remain in their territories to work as slave farmers and so on,” he said.
“So in situations like that, we have to painstakingly screen each of them to ascertain their level of complicity in the war, and then we take biomedical details of all of them. We ensure we separate the non-combatant ones and take them to their camps, while the real fighters stay with us here.”
The source added that even the real fighters also helped the government officials at the holding facility to identify the non-combatant Boko Haram by corroborating their claims of innocence.
Since June this year, when the death of the former leader of Boko Haram, Abubakar Shekau, was announced, hundreds of his followers would rather give up their 12 years of struggle by surrendering to the government troops, than pledging allegiance to the leader of the factional Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), Abu-Musab Albarnawi.
It was reported that late Shekau took his own life in a suicide bombing during a fight with Albarnawi rival group.