Boko Haram factional leader Abubakar Shekau, in a new audio, takes a dig at Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, his American counterpart Donald Trump and two presidents in the Lake Chad region over the spread of coronavirus.
Shekau speaks in Hausa in the audio posted by Ahmad Salkida, a journalist known to have the knowledge of the different factions Boko Haram.
“We thank you God for this pandemic. We thank you that it (the pandemic) has surfaced in the times of Trump, the abnormal one,” Skekua said.
“The time of Idris Deby (uses an expletive) and the time of Buhari and Mahamadou Issoufou, the one who does the bidding of the French,” he said.
Shekau, in the less than two minutes recording, says it is evil that birthed the coronavirus pandemic
“The evil you do is what brought this, stop blaming anything, whatever this is, may God protect us,” Shekau said.
“We have anti-virus while you are infected with the coronavirus, we have anti-coronavirus; it is the Allah we worship. We pray, we slash fornicators, we cut hands (meaning punishment for thieves),” he added.
Jihadists are taking advantage of the pandemic to attack some countries. Al-Qaeda-affiliated insurgents on Monday claimed an attack that killed dozens of soldiers in Mali – Mali has recorded 123 coronavirus cases to date, including 10 fatalities.
In a statement verified on Monday by the jihadist-surveillance group SITE Intelligence, the jihadists said they attacked a military base in the northern town of Bamba on April 6, AFP reported.
Since the World Health Organisation was notified of the virus on the last day of 2019, the disease has killed more than 126,000 people and infected more than 1.9 million, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
The disease has been detected in more than 200 countries and territories, with Italy, the US and Spain experiencing the most widespread outbreaks outside of China. In Nigeria, there have been 373 confirmed cases of the virus and 12 deaths.
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