9th January, 2015
Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan has claimed that the leader of a home-grown militant group currently serving time in South Africa for terror offences had tried to kill him.
The head of state said in a speech in Lagos on Thursday that Henry Okah, who headed the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) had been tasked to carry out the assassination.
He alleged that Okah, whose group fought for a greater share of oil wealth in the 2000s, “was procured by some Nigerians to assassinate me”.
“And Okah bombed Abuja. The attempt was to assassinate me,” he told supporters of his ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
Okah, an engineer, was convicted of 13 counts of terrorism in 2013 and sentenced to 24 years in jail in South Africa, where he has permanent residency.
The charges related to twin bombings at celebrations of Nigeria’s 50 years of independence on October 1, 2010, which killed at least 12 in Abuja, and two other bombings in the southern oil hub of Warri in March that year.
“Intelligence investigation from South Africa intelligence system and Nigerian intelligence system roped him in that plan to assassinate me,” Jonathan told the crowd.
Jonathan has never before said that he was the subject of an assassination plot and despite MEND’s claim of responsibility for the attack, indicated that other forces were responsible.
“People just use the name of MEND to camouflage criminality and terrorism,” he said in a televised interview at the time.
He was responding on Thursday to an apparent statement from the group, which was active in the oil-producing southern Niger Delta region until a government amnesty.
In it, a purported MEND spokesman, Jomo Gbomo, claimed that it was backing opposition candidate Muhammadu Buhari in next month’s presidential elections.
Gbomo on Friday challenged Jonathan to reveal the names of those he claimed were behind the plot and explain why they were not arrested, tried and convicted.
Jonathan’s spokesman Reuben Abati was not immediately available when contacted by AFP.
Okah, who claims the terror charges against him were politically motivated, last November began an appeal against his conviction, arguing that the South African court had no right to try him.