Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau killed himself in a fight against rival terrorist fighters, Daesh’s branch in the West African province (ISWAP) terrorist group said in a statement released to the Agence France-Presse (AFP) on Sunday, two weeks after reports emerged he had dead.
“Shekau preferred to be humiliated in the future rather than be humiliated on earth. He killed himself immediately by detonating an explosive substance,” a Kanuri-speaking voice similar to ISWAP leader Abu Musab al-Barnawi said in a statement. which AFP provided from the same source that sent previous messages from the group.
Boko Haram has not yet officially commented on the leader’s death and the Nigerian army said it was investigating the allegation.
Since Shekau took control of Boko Haram in 2009 from founder Mohammed Yusuf, Shekau has been reported dead several times, only to return.
Nigerian media were filled with speculation that the man who made international headlines for kidnapping nearly 300 schoolgirls in 2014 and 330 Nigerian students at the end of last year may finally be dead.
But 24 hours after the news came out, the army was still investigating, while details of what happened and where Shekau was may be unclear.
More than 40,000 people have been killed and more than 2 million displaced from the conflict in northeastern Nigeria since 2009, and the fighting has spread to parts of neighboring Chad, Cameroon and Niger.
Since 2016, two rival factions from the Boko Haram movement have emerged following disagreements over Shekau’s indiscriminate attacks on Muslim civilians and his use of women and children as suicide bombers.
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