Nigeria jails 44 Boko Haram militants for financing terrorism in the country

Nigeria on Saturday slapped 44 Boko Haram jihadists with jail terms of up to 30 years for funding terrorist activities, a spokesman for a counterterrorism agency said.

The convicted were among 54 suspects arraigned in four specially-constituted civilian courts set up at a military base in the town of Kainji in central Niger state, Abu Michael, a spokesman for Nigeria’s counterterrorism centre said in a statement.

On Wednesday, Nigeria resumed trials of the suspects seven years after it suspended prosecution of over 1,000 people suspected of ties with the jihadist group that has been waging an insurgency since 2009 to establish a caliphate.

“The verdicts delivered from the trials resulted in prison sentences ranging from 10 to 30 years, all to be served with hard labour,” Michael said.

“With the latest convictions, Nigeria has now secured a total of 785 cases involving terrorism financing and other terrorism-related offences,” said the statement.

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The trial of the remaining 10 cases was adjourned to a later date, he said.

Nigeria is listed as a “grey list country” by international monitors alongside South Sudan, South Africa, Monaco and Croatia due to deficiencies in preventing money laundering and terrorism financing.

The Nigerian military’s 16-year campaign to crush the jihadists in the northeast has killed more than 40,000 people and displaced around two million from their homes, according to the United Nations.

The violence has also spilt over into neighbouring Cameroon, Chad and Niger.

In October 2017, Nigeria began mass trials of the Islamist insurgents, more than eight years after the start of the violence.

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That phase of the trials, which lasted five months, saw the convictions of 200 jihadist fighters with sentencing ranging from “death penalty and life imprisonment to prison terms of 20 to 70 years,” Michael said.

The offences for the convictions included attacks on women and children, the destruction of religious sites, the killing of civilians, and the abduction of women and children.

Human rights groups accused the military of arbitrarily arresting thousands of civilians, with many being held for years without access to lawyers or being brought to court.