You Can’t Kill Innocent People Shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ — Buhari To Boko Haram Terrorists
BY EDMOND ODOK – President Muhammadu Buhari says with adequate education and sensitization majority of Nigerians are now aware that the Boko Haram insurgency has neither religious nor ethnic undercurrents.
He said concerted public enlightenment by government and organisations has helped to make it clear to people that Boko Haram was a perversion of religion, rather than Islamic ideology and every God-fearing person is not permitted to take innocent lives.
President Buhari, who spoke while hosting the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Karin Ahmad Khan, at State House in Abuja on Tuesday, said; “God is justice. You can’t kill innocent people, and shout; Allah Akbar (God is great). It’s either you don’t know that God at all, or you are simply being stupid.”
According to him; “To say Western education is unacceptable (Haram) is very fraudulent. That is why we are fighting them, and educating the people. And we are succeeding a lot. We came into office when things were very bad, but we are educating the people.
“Education is fundamental. Religion and ethnicity are out of it. Some people have just made it a lifestyle to cause confusion, destruction, and death.”
In his remarks, the ICC Prosecutor, Ahmad Khan described extremism as cancer, which spreads and can also recede, noting that what Boko Haram does in collaboration with the Islamic State of West African Province (ISWAP), “is a perversion of religion.”
He said the ICC believes in complementarity, “which promotes collaboration, as against confrontation,” urging Nigeria, in concert with other Sahel/Lake Chad basin countries, to get the United Nations Security Council to refer atrocities committed by the terrorist groups operating in the region to ICC, for investigation and subsequent trial.
