{The US State Department will designate Boko Haram, the Nigerian Islamist group responsible for the 2011 bombing of the UN headquarters in Abuja, as a “foreign terrorist organisation”, congressional sources said on Tuesday.}
The US State Department will formally designate the Nigerian Islamist militant group Boko Haram as a “foreign terrorist organisation” on Wednesday, congressional sources and others briefed on the matter said.
The designation is significant because it directs US law enforcement and regulatory agencies to block business and financial transactions with Boko Haram, which is fighting to impose Islamic law in northern Nigeria and has ties to al Qaeda. Boko Haram means “Western education is sacrilege”.
The move makes it a crime under US law to provide “material support” to the group.
Boko Haram and other splinter Islamist groups are seen as the biggest security threat in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country and top oil exporter.
In one of the group’s most recent attacks, fighters dressed as the military shot and hacked to death 19 motorists after blocking a highway in the northeast of the country. In August 2011, the group bombed the UN headquarters in the Nigerian capital of Abuja, killing 24 people.
In May this year President Goodluck Jonathan expanded a military campaign against the group and last month said his forces had killed 74 of the suspected militants in an air assault.
FRANCE 24
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