US Places Whopping $7m Bounty On Boko Haram Leader Shekau
The United States Department of State says it will give $7 million (N2.5 billion) reward to anyone with credible information that can lead to the arrest of Abubakar Shekau, leader of the Boko Haram insurgent group.
This was disclosed in a tweet by the Rewards for Justice Program (RJP), the counterterrorism rewards program of the US Department of State’s Diplomatic Security Service.
“The United States Department of State offers a reward up to $7m for information leading to the arrest of the terrorist, Abubakar Shekau, leader of Boko Haram,” the tweet reads.
The US had also placed a bounty of the same sum on Shekau in June 2013.
On June 21, 2012, the country designated Shekau a “specially designated global terrorist” under executive order 13224.
Shekau took over the leadership of the insurgent group in 2010 following the killing of Mohammed Yusuf, its former leader.
There had been several claims that Shekau has been killed, but he resurfaced in videos at every turn countering those claims.
In February 2018, the federal government also placed a N3m bounty on Shekau.
He has always appeared on video with no one able to locate his whereabouts for almost a decade.