Boko Haram Leader Claims Abuja Bombing, Tells Obama to Go ‘To Hell’ (+video)

Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

The leader of Nigeria’s Boko Haram terrorist group in a weekend video claimed responsibility for a deadly bomb attack in Abuja last week, taunting the government for its failure to defeat the Islamist group and telling President Obama and other world leaders to go “to hell.”

“To hell with Obama!” Abubakar Shekau said during the rant. “To hell with [U.N. secretary-general] Ban ki Moon! To hell with [French president] Francois Hollande! To hell with [Russian president] Vladimir Putin!”

Although Shekau claimed responsibility for last Monday’s bomb blast in Abuja, which cost at least 75 lives and was the deadliest terrorist attack ever in the capital, he did not refer to the abduction hours later of more than 100 schoolgirls in the country’s far north-east. A Borno state’s top education official said in a statement Friday 85 of the girls remain missing.

Shekau, one of three Boko Haram leaders designated by the State Department in 2012 under an executive order designed to disrupt funding to terrorists, said his group carried out the bombing in Abuja because of the killing of Muslims in Nigeria and elsewhere. His remarks in the local Hausa language were translated by Premium Times, an Abuja-based media group.

“We carried out the attack because you kill Muslims in Plateau,” he said in comments directed at Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan, and referring to the Nigerian state that lies roughly on the divide between the country’s Muslim north and Christian south.

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