Nigeria asked the UN Security Council to add Boko Haram to the UN’s list of al Qaeda-linked terrorist groups. A top US State Department official said the US does not consider Boko Haram as an al Qaeda branch but rather “as its own terrorist group.” The Pentagon reached an agreement over the weekend to share some intelligence with Nigeria in the search for over 100 kidnapped girls. Two car bombs detonated in a crowded market in Jos in central Plateau state, killing 200 people, most of them women. Two suspects in a recent suicide bombing in Kano were arrested. Thirteen Igbo groups issued a statement supporting President Jonathan and blaming the emergence of Boko Haram on the introduction of sharia law into Zamfara state by then governor Sani Yerima in 2000. Senior Nigerian diplomat Bola Dada has said that Yerima imposed sharia shortly after visiting Osama bin Laden’s training camps in Sudan.
