The Nigerian government paid bandits N20 million in order not to shoot down the presidential jet carrying President Muhammadu Buhari whenever he is in the North West.
Wall Street Journal reports that a young intelligence officer clutching a cash-filled bag took the money to the bandits in order to retrieve a weapon that directly threatened the country’s president.
According to the outlet, a kidnapping gang encamped in Nigeria’s Rugu forest had seized an antiaircraft gun in a clash with a military unit. That posed a threat to President Muhammadu Buhari, who had been planning to fly to his hometown about 80 miles away, and the government needed to buy it back.
An hour later, the officer, who declined to be identified, was clasping hands with a leader of a diffuse network of criminals whose campaign of kidnapping civilians—including hundreds of schoolchildren—has raised millions of dollars to build an arsenal of heavy weaponry they are using to wrest control of swaths of the north, including the president’s home state.
Over tea, the militant leader agreed to part with the truck-mounted 12.7 caliber antiaircraft gun in exchange for the ransom: His men had plenty more munitions, he said.
“I don’t need the army’s weapons,” he said, according to the officer, whose account was corroborated by another senior Nigerian official involved in the previously undisclosed mission.
The mission to buy back the antiaircraft gun began with a handoff from a high-ranking air force intelligence officer in the capital Abuja: a black zip-up bag he said was full of 20 million Nigerian naira.
It was given to the young intelligence officer tapped to exchange it for the antiaircraft gun the bandits had seized in an area where Mr. Buhari frequently flew to visit his hometown of Daura.
The officer flew to the town of Jibia on the border with Niger, where a dozen armed men emerged from the forest to meet him. They escorted him on motorbikes into thickening forest for hours, arriving at the home of their leader, a wiry man in his 30s, who collected the sack.
While the bandits began disassembling the antiaircraft gun and attempting to strap it to a wobbling motorbike, their leader aired a series of grievances against the state: Vigilantes had kidnapped his father, young men could no longer earn a livelihood rearing cattle, and airstrikes were killing civilians in his camps. “You are bombing us from the air,” he said. “You are killing our children.”
His fighters were conducting reprisal operations against vigilantes and the army, which had helped them accrue a huge weapons stockpile, he said. Eventually, the bandits strapped the antiaircraft gun across two motorbikes and began to wheel it out of the camp. “They made it look so simple,” the air force officer said. “They made it feel casual.”
