A young son of Boko Haram’s founder, Muslim Mohammed Yusuf, has been arrested in Chad.
It was gathered that the Boko Haram founder’s son was apprehended in Chad, where he was allegedly leading a jihadist cell.
AFP quoted an intelligence source and a former insurgent as disclosing that Yusuf was arrested alongside five other suspected Boko Haram members.
The Islamist group has sown terror around the Lake Chad region for around 15 years and has mounted increasingly brazen attacks on villages and military bases in recent months.
Chadian police confirmed having arrested six Boko Haram members, but could not say if one of them was the older Yusuf’s son.
A Nigerian intelligence source in the Lake Chad region told AFP at the weekend that they received a report of the arrest of a six-man jihadist cell in Chad.
“The team was headed by Muslim, the youngest son of the late Boko Haram founder, Mohammed Yusuf,” the source said.
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The source, however, said that the cell belonged to the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) group, a rival offshoot that splintered off from Boko Haram over ideological disagreements.
The source added that Yusuf was an infant when his father was killed in 2009 during a military crackdown on Boko Haram that left some 800 people dead, giving his age as 18.
Photos seen by AFP after the arrests in Chad show a young, short, and slender man in a blue tracksuit – with a striking resemblance to Yusuf – standing next to far older men.
Yusuf, who goes by the alias Abdrahman Mahamat Abdoulaye, is the younger brother of ISWAP leader Habib Yusuf, alias Abu Mus’ab Al-Barnawi.
A former lieutenant of Yusuf’s father, who has denounced Boko Haram but has knowledge of the group’s inner workings, also said Yusuf had been arrested.
“He and the team were arrested by Chadian security. They are six in number,” he said.
Chadian police said they had arrested “bandits who operate in the city… they are undocumented, they are members of Boko Haram,” police spokesman Paul Manga told AFP from N’djamena.
He said the cell was arrested “a few months ago.”
Nigeria’s counter-terrorism centre and the national intelligence service did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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