Nnamdi Kanu: Nigerian Separatist Leader Resurfaces in Israel

Missing Nigerian separatist leader Nnamdi Kanu has resurfaced in Israel more than a year after soldiers stormed his home.

“I’m in Israel,” Mr Kanu said on Sunday in a broadcast on his outlawed pirate radio station – Radio Biafra.

A video of the Indigenous People Of Biafra (Ipob) leader praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem has also been shared online.

Mr Kanu holds both Nigerian and British nationality and says he is Jewish.

His wife, Uchechi Kanu, told the BBC in February that she believed the government knew where her husband was being held after his home was raided by soldiers.

Mr Kanu has been campaigning for an independent state called Biafra in south-eastern Nigeria.

In 2015, Mr Kanu was charged with “criminal conspiracy, intimidation and membership of an illegal organisation” – charges that could amount to treason.

He was released on bail last year after spending more than 19 months without trial on treason charges.

He then renewed his campaign for independence, before his house in the south-eastern Abia state was raided by the military.

Who is Nnamdi Kanu?

He was a relatively obscure figure until 2009 when he started Radio Biafra, a station that called for an independent state for the Igbo people and is broadcast to Nigeria from London.

Though he grew up in Nigeria’s south-east and went to the University of Nsukka, Mr Kanu moved to the UK before graduating.

Soon after setting up Ipob in 2014, he spoke to gatherings of the large Igbo diaspora, calling for Biafran independence. In some of his comments, he urged Biafrans to take up arms against the Nigerian state.

“We need guns and we need bullets,” he said in one such address. This comment is what brought him to the attention of Nigeria’s security services.

What is Biafra?

The plan for a Biafra state is not new.

In 1967 Igbo leaders declared a Biafran state, but after a brutal civil war, which led to the deaths of up to a million people, the secessionist rebellion was defeated.

Mr Kanu is the latest in a line of ethnic Igbo activists taking up the cause of pushing for an independent state, saying the Igbos have been marginalised by successive Nigerian governments.

The Israel connection

Mr Kanu said in Sunday’s broadcast that he was still pushing for a referendum to create a breakaway state in the south-east.

He urged his followers to boycott next year’s elections in Nigeria unless the government agrees to the push for a referendum.

“Ipob will liberate Biafra and we will not take part in any elections until we get a referendum, it is not negotiable, we will do it by any means,” he said.

“I will be back soon in the land of Biafra and I will bring hell with me,” he said.

“I owe my survival to the state of Israel,” he added, saying that he had been aided by Mossad, country’s spy agency, without elaborating how he was assisted.

The BBC has contacted Mossad for its comments.

It is, however, unclear how Mr Kanu was able to get to Israel, as he had to surrender his Nigerian and British passports after his arrest.

The Ipob leader says he is an Igbo Jew, part of a group who believe they are descendants of the lost tribe of Israel who settled in West Africa. According to Jewish tradition, the tribes were scattered after the conquest of the Kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians in the 8th Century BC.

Source: BBC