Nigeria: French hostages in new video
2013-03-19 07:56
Maiduguri - A video surfaced on Monday showing a man who
appeared to be a French hostage held by Islamic extremists with six other
family members kidnapped on February 19 in northern Cameroon.
The video's audio airs a man's voice that identifies himself
as Tanguy Moulin-Fournier. He says that his family is being held by the Islamic
radical sect known as Boko Haram which wants all its members freed, especially
women and children held in Nigerian and Cameroonian custody.
Boko Haram has been waging a campaign of bombings and
shootings across Nigeria's north. They are held responsible for more than 790
deaths last year alone, and dozens more since the beginning of this year. On
Monday bombings in two northern cities killed at least 17 people.
Moulin-Fournier said his family is not doing well in
captivity.
"We lose force [strength] every day and start to be
sick; we will not stay very long like this," Moulin-Fournier says in the
recording.
The family has been held hostage for 25 days, he says in a
shaky voice, giving the only date indication on the recording. The family
comprising of Tanguy, his brother, his wife and their four children was
kidnapped outside a national park in Cameroon's Far North region.
The video was not immediately available, but a media source
who viewed it says it shows the Moulin-Fournier family, including the four
children. The source spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorised
to speak to the media.
"They will not be able to get the seven hostages unless
they free our members," one of the family's captors says in the recording,
speaking in the Hausa language of Nigeria's north.
Difficult conditions
This is the second video showing the Moulin-Fournier family
since another video was posted on YouTube three weeks ago.
"The living conditions are very hard,"
Moulin-Fournier said, "hot [the heat], water, food, sleep, life in the
desert, et cetera -conditions even more difficult for the white men that we are
who are not used to the African hot and for the kids."
The video comes days after French foreign minister Laurent
Fabius visited Nigeria and Cameroon as part of a campaign to get the hostages
freed. He said that, in addition to the family of seven, extremists also hold
an eighth French national who had been working on a renewable energy project in
northern Nigeria. It is not clear which extremist group currently holds the French
engineer kidnapped on December 19.
Fabius said he had been working with Nigerian and
Cameroonian authorities using an approach that he described as "determined
and discrete".
The hostage situation is exacerbated by the recent killings
of other foreign captives held by a splinter group of Boko Haram.
European diplomats said those seven foreign workers who had
been kidnapped from a construction site in northern Nigeria on February 16 had
been killed by their captors after a video showing some of the corpses was made
public. The killings stoked fears about the extremists' readiness to execute
their hostages.
However Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan told
journalists on Monday that all seven hostages from the construction project may
not be dead. Those seven hostages include two Lebanese nationals, one citizen
each from the United Kingdom, Greece and Italy, and two people now believed to
be Syrian. Lebanese President Michel Sleiman, who visited President Jonathan in
Abuja on Monday, said that he still had hopes that some of the hostages would
be freed.
More extremist violence
Jonathan said that he told Sleiman that if all seven had
been killed, Nigeria will make every effort to retrieve their bodies.
But even as Jonathan spoke, on Monday, Nigeria was hit by
more extremist violence.
Two secondary schools were attacked in the north-eastern
city of Maiduguri, leaving a teacher dead and three girl students injured,
military spokesperson Sagir Musa said. He blamed the Boko Haram sect and said
local security forces had killed three of its members in a counterattack.
Hours later, at least 16 people were killed in explosions at
a bus station in the northern city of Kano, according to medical officials. No
group claimed responsibility for the blast, but suspicion fell once again on
Boko Haram.
"The federal government will not be stampeded, for any
reason whatsoever, into abandoning its unrelenting war against terrorists in
the country," said Nigerian presidential spokesperson Reuben Abati in
reaction to the Kano blast on Monday.
- SAPA
