LAGOS – A video posted online Monday apparently shows seven French hostages kidnapped from northern Cameroon, with a masked militant claiming the radical Islamic group Boko Haram from neighboring Nigeria holds them.
The video, posted to YouTube and mentioned on a jihadist website, shows one of two French men reading a statement, with a woman in between them. Four children sit on the ground near them, flanked by two masked militants wearing camouflage uniforms and holding rifles.
A masked militant in front says in the video that Boko Haram kidnapped the French hostages, a family of three adults and four children who were taken from outside a national park in Cameroon’s Far North Region on Feb. 19. A black banner in the background, bearing the images of the Quran flanked by two Kalashnikov assault rifles, also resembles a symbol previously used by Boko Haram.
The man says the kidnappings were carried out because of French military intervention in northern Mali, where its troops have fought with Malian soldiers against Islamic extremists who took over the north in the months following a coup last year. The man also threatens the Nigerian and Cameroonian government, calling on them to release their imprisoned members.
“Let the French president know that he has launched war against Islam and we are fighting him everywhere,” the man says in Arabic. “Let him know that we are spread everywhere to save our brothers.”
The man threatens to kill the French hostages if the group’s demands are not met.
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said “for us, these images are horribly shocking. They show cruelty without limits.” He said France is fully mobilized to free the hostages but “verifications needed in these circumstances” are under way.
The French gas group GDF Suez last week identified the captives as an employee working in Yaounde and his family. The group was vacationing in the north, a company statement said without elaborating. Cameroonian and Nigerian soldiers continue to search for them in the arid, rural border region the two countries share in West Africa.
Boko Haram — which means “Western education is sacrilege” — has launched a guerrilla campaign of bombings and shootings across Nigeria’s predominantly Muslim north. It is blamed for at least 792 killings last year alone. It is known to have ties to al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, an Algerian-based group that opened a front in Mali.
A total of 15 French citizens are currently being held in western Africa. In addition to the seven kidnapped in Cameroon, there is one other in Nigeria and seven thought to be in northern Mali.
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