[b]After five days of sectarian attacks, the Islamist militant sect, Boko Haram, has finally succumbed to the firepower of security forces as its leader, Mohammed Yusuf, 39, fled his Maiduguri base.
Yusuf did not, however, go far as he was captured and shot dead by a combined team of army and police personnel, which had been trying to contain the sectarian unrest which had claimed at least 600 lives across five northern states.
Daily Sun gathered last night that Yusuf was seized after a manhunt involving military helicopters and armed police.
There were conflicting accounts on how the Islamist leader was arrested. One claimed he was arrested hiding in his in-laws house after fleeing his enclave, while another said he was seized on the outskirts of the Borno State capital.
“Mohammed Yusuf has been arrested. He is now at the Giwa barracks (in Maiduguri metropolis),” Borno State Police Commissioner, Christopher Dega, confirmed to reporters.
However, Assistant Inspector General of Police, in charge of Zone 12, Moses Anegbode, later told newsmen Yusuf had been killed.
Also, Yusuf’s Deputy, Abubakar Shekau, was killed along with about 200 of the sect’s followers in the all-night raid on the sect’s base on Wednesday.
At the end of the operation, which lasted several hours, scores of corpses of the sect’s members littered the roads leading to Bayan Quarters, base of the Islamic extremists and the building in the compound.
A source at a Maiduguri hospital described the casualty figure as ‘countless’. “Some of them are still lying in the streets and around the police headquarters.
Our hospital mortuary is full, while those injured in the fighting are lying on the floors of the hospital for lack of space.” Recovered from the building, which also houses a mosque, according to Colonel Ahanotu, who led the operation were, about 20 cars, including a Sport Utility Vehicle, one Toyota Camry, Honda cars and about 200 motorcycles. Other items found in the residence were, sewing machines, deep freezers, food items, and home-made petrol bombs.
Borno State Governor, Ali Sheriff, also visited the scene to assess the comfort in which the self-styled anti-West sect leader lived. “How can a man who condemned western lifestyle be watching cable satellite, eat canned food, produced and packaged by technologists who attended Western schools?” A senior government official who accompanied the governor asked.
Unarguably the bloodiest sectarian crisis in the country since the Jos mayhem, last November, the Boko Haram disturbances which started in Bauchi last Sunday and spread to Bauchi, Yobe, Katsina, Sokoto and Kano states have so far claimed at least 600 people, with about 3,000 residents already displaced.
It would be recalled that the Taliban leader, Mohammed Yusuf, was once dragged before a Maiduguri High Court for public incitement, but he challenged the Borno government through his counsel for alleged infringement on his freedom of expression.
Lanky Mohammed Yusuf, a Hausa descent from Yobe was described as a quiet man, who could hardly hurt a fly.
Those who encountered him claimed he was schooled in the Islamiya sect Quranic School in the old city of Maiduguri. He was said to have attended the Maiduguri Arabic Teachers College (although this claim has been faulted). By 2000, Mohammed Yusuf became noticeable in Borno with his radical preaching on Islam. He set up a camp on the border with the Niger Republic, from where he launched series of attacks on the police.[/b]


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