1,000 hostages rescued from Boko Haram in Nigeria

Nigeria's military says it has rescued more than 1,000 people held captive in northeastern Nigeria by the armed group Boko Haram.

Brigadier General Texas Chukwu, army spokesman, announced on Monday evening that the hostages were rescued from four villages in Borno State.

The Multinational Joint Task Force, which comprises Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Benin, helped to secure the release of the captives, mostly women and children.

Some men who had been forced to become Boko Haram fighters were among those rescued, the army said.

Boko Haram has been held responsible for thousands of abductions, especially of young girls and women, during its nine-year armed campaign in Nigeria and surrounding countries.

The group gained international notoriety after its fighters kidnapped 276 schoolgirls in the town of Chibok in April 2014. About 100 girls are still missing.

More than 20,000 people have been killed in the fighting, which has also forced some two million to flee their homes.

Al Jazeera's Ahmed Idris, reporting from Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State, explained that the rescued individuals will be taken to hospitals to be treated for wounds and ailments sustained in captivity.

"They will be profiled and de-briefed by security forces before they are rehabilitated and eventually returned to society," Idris said.

"For those who carried arms before, fighting the Nigerian state, they will have to undergo another rehabilitation process being conducted by the Nigerian government in another state ... as part of an operation called Operation Safe Corridor."

Leaders from the countries comprising the Multinational Joint Task Force will be meeting on Tuesday in Maiduguri to discuss the long-term strategy on how to deal with the Boko Haram crisis.

In March, a Boko Haram attack on the northeastern town of Rann left at least two aid workers, a doctor and eight soldiers dead.

In February, the group's fighters attacked another school in the northeastern state of Yobe and seized more than 110 schoolgirls. A month later, the government said 101 had been freed.

Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari said earlier this year that the era of Boko Haram violence "is gradually drawing to end".

However, the group continues to launch attacks in the country's northeast.

Al Jazeera

Video - Fulani herdsmen in Nigeria blamed for attack on church

Disputes over territory are escalating elsewhere in Nigeria. President Muhammadu Buhari's government is under pressure to prevent such attacks, ahead of elections next year. Al Jazeera's Jamela Alindogan reports from Benue state, where an attack on a church is dividing a community that has lived peacefully for generations.

Raid on village in Nigeria leaves 45 dead

At least 45 people were killed after armed bandits attacked a village in northern Nigeria, officials said Sunday, the latest in a series of attacks in the country’s rural areas.

Fighting between militiamen and the bandits erupted after the raid on the village of Gwaska, in northwestern Kaduna state, on Saturday, according to Agence France-Press.

“There was violence between the militias, who are very powerful, and bandits,” said Kaduna’s state police chief, Austin Iwar.

An unnamed vigilante told AFP that he believed the bandits to be from neighboring Zamfara state. “The 45 bodies were found scattered in the bush. The bandits pursued residents who mobilized to defend the village after overpowering them,” he said, adding that children were among those killed. “They burnt down many homes,” he said.

Thirteen people were killed last week in Zamfara in fighting between cattle thieves and local civilian militia. Cattle rustlers and kidnapping gangs have long plagued rural herding communities in the state with killings, robberies, and arson.

Nigeria’s security forces are stretched thin as the country tackles Boko Haram jihadists in the north and pirates in the south. Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari has been criticized for his failure to quell the violence, which will be a key issue in the 2019 presidential elections.

TIME

Canada working with U.S. in Nigeria to reduce issuing visas for asylum seekers

Canada has officials working with U.S. visa officers in Lagos, Nigeria, as Ottawa leans on its neighbor to stop issuing so many visas to Nigerians who then make refugee claims in Canada.

The Canadian government is trying to stem the flow of asylum seekers illegally walking across the U.S. border even as their ranks grow: About 2,500 asylum seekers crossed into Canada to file refugee claims in April, according to estimates from the federal immigration and refugee department — the highest level since August and almost triple last April’s figure.

More than 26,000 people illegally crossed the Canada-U.S. border in the past 15 months to file refugee claims.

The Canadian government says many of the more recent arrivals are Nigerians who arrived bearing valid U.S. visas after having spent very little time in the United States.

“It is apparent that they obtained those visas with the express intent to actually go to Canada. ... We’ve been sharing that information with the United States with the view of preventing the abuse of U.S. visas,” a Canadian immigration department spokeswoman told Reuters in an email.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his ministers faced pointed questions this week after Reuters reported that Canada wants U.S. help turning back thousands of asylum seekers.

A Canadian official familiar with the matter told Reuters that Canada wants to amend a bilateral agreement to allow it to block border-crossing refugee claimants.

Canada has asked for this change “at least a dozen” times since September, the official said.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has said it is reviewing Canada’s proposal but has not made a decision.

Two Canadian officials have been sent to Lagos to work directly with their counterparts in the U.S. visa office, a spokeswoman for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada said in an email on Wednesday.

The officials are “meeting regularly to exchange information on migration movements” with the aim of lowering the number of people who go through the United States to Canada using a U.S. visa.

Since June, Canadian police have intercepted more than 7,600 Nigerian asylum seekers, 81 percent of whom had a valid U.S. non-immigrant visa, the spokeswoman added.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. State Department wrote that “consular officers in the field often coordinate with our close partners from other countries to discuss matters of shared concern.” She did not elaborate on the role the Canadian officials are playing.

Trudeau’s government is under pressure to appear in control of the country’s border and refugee system while obeying Canadian law and maintaining its image as compassionate and welcoming of newcomers.

Reuters

Nigerian internet scammers targeting corporate email accounts

West Africa’s infamous internet scammers have evolved, dropping their impersonations of online love interests, princes and U.S. soldiers in favor of hijacking corporate emails, costing businesses hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

It is a much more lucrative venture that works by gaining access to corporate email login details or passing off almost-identical addresses as the real deal, a scam known as Business Email Compromise (BEC), according to a report by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike issued on Thursday.

These Nigerian rackets now dwarf other types of online criminal theft, amounting to at least $5.3 billion of losses between October 2013 and the end of 2016, said CrowdStrike and the U.S. FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3).

“There’s a disproportionate amount of criminal gains they get from it,” Adam Meyers, vice president of intelligence at California-based CrowdStrike, told Reuters. “The lion’s share of ill-gotten, fraudulent money is around these business email compromise attacks. It’s a huge problem for our customer set.”

Nigeria has become one of the hubs of BEC. Nigerian online fraudsters, known as “Yahoo boys”, became notorious for trying to pass themselves off as people in financial need or Nigerian princes offering an outstanding return on an investment.

The capers became known as “419 scams” after the section of the national penal code that dealt - ineffectively - with fraud.

Yahoo boys even impersonated a U.S. forces commander in Afghanistan to defraud people by asking for help in recovering the assets of deceased soldiers. It forced the commander to issue a Facebook statement saying he would never try to contact anyone asking for financial help.

Now the scammers have bigger fish to fry, with the potential gains amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars a year, according to CrowdStrike.

Behind the fraudsters is an organized crime network with its hands in human trafficking, drugs, prostitution, money laundering and email fraud and cybercrime, the CrowdStrike report said. “The magnitude of this criminal threat has only recently begun to be understood,” it said.

The Black Axe gang sprang from Nigerian universities and now extends from Africa to North America, Europe and Asia. Its targets have ranged from semiconductor makers to schools in U.S. states including Connecticut and Minnesota, passing themselves off as executives and lawyers to trick employees into wiring sometimes millions of dollars a day into bank accounts.

From there, the money is quickly laundered through a series of bank accounts that can be traced to Hong Kong and China, where the trail often goes cold because diverging regulations foil monitoring, CrowdStrike’s Meyers said.

With that money, the Nigerian scammers are often enjoying the high life, said Meyers, noting social media accounts filled with pictures of them posing with luxury Mercedes cars, gold watches, jewellery and champagne.

“It’s really hard to stop; you can’t stop it with anti-virus or any kind of software, it’s really kind of a human problem.”

Reuters