Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Lagos, Nigeria
A new bill to strengthen counter-terrorism measures in the West African country is awaiting approval by parliament, Vice President Goodluck Jonathan said in an e-mailed statement today from the capital, Abuja.
Following the Dec. 25 bombing attempt, for which Al-Qaeda in Yemen claimed responsibility, the U.S. included Nigeria among countries from which airline passengers will face special screening before boarding flights to American destinations. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old native of Nigeria, has been charged in the U.S. with trying to blowup the Northwest Airlines flight with 278 passengers on board as it landed in Detroit.
Jonathan yesterday met Jane Holl Lute, the U.S. Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security, to discuss the incident and requested that Nigeria be removed from a list of 14 countries deemed either state sponsors of terror or “countries of interest.”
While Abdulmutallab is Nigerian, he left Nigeria “at an early age” and received his “indoctrination far from the shores of Nigeria,” Jonathan said.
Nigeria, which vies with Angola as Africa’s top oil producer, is the fifth-biggest source of U.S. oil imports. U.S. energy companies ExxonMobil Corp. and Chevron Corp. operate joint ventures with the state-owned Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC).
Nigeria would welcome U.S. assistance “in order that any areas of perceived technical weaknesses can be strengthened without delay,” Jonathan said.
Legislation being considered by Nigerian lawmakers targets terrorists, their associates and sponsors, and provides for international cooperation in the use of watch-lists and the tracking of suspects, Justice Minister Michael Aondoakaa said today on the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA), a state-owned broadcaster. Prescribed punishments include life imprisonment.
The bill is aligned to a benchmark set by the United Nations (UN) and will also include hostage-taking among terror offences “to deal with our own domestic problem” of widespread kidnapping, Aondoakaa said.
Armed groups fighting for a greater share of Nigeria’s oil wealth regularly abduct foreign workers for ransom in the Niger Delta, the country’s main crude-producing region. Yesterday, unidentified gunmen kidnapped three Britons and a Colombian working for Royal Dutch Shell Plc.
Nigeria will cooperate fully with U.S. investigators of the terror plot and won’t allow a “single incident to rupture the relationship” between the two countries, Aondoakaa said.
Source(s): Bloomberg News
