A new video has emerged online, where the acclaimed dead Boko
Haram leader Abubakar Shekau has dismissed Nigerian military claims of his death,
and said the militants had implemented strict Islamic law in captured towns.
"Here
I am, alive. I will only die the day Allah takes my breath," Shekau said
in the video exclusively available to AFP, adding that his group was
"running our... Islamic caliphate" and administering strict sharia
punishments.
Boko Haram has shown images of extreme violence before, but the
latest video shows at length graphic scenes of an amputation and a stoning to
death as well as a beheading. It also purports to show the wreckage of a
Nigerian Air Force jet that went missing in the northeast on September 11. Boko
Haram said its fighters shot it down but the military denied the claim.
The military announced last week that Shekau was dead and that a
man who had been posing as the group's leader in the videos had been killed
after fighting with troops in the far north-east.
The new 36-minute video shows Shekau, in combat fatigues and black
rubber boots, standing on the back of a pick-up truck and firing an anti-aircraft
gun into the air.
Standing in front of three camouflaged vans and flanked by four
heavily armed, masked fighters, he then speaks for 16 minutes in Arabic and the
Hausa language widely spoken in northern Nigeria.
There was no indication of where or when the video was shot.
Shekau appears in separate images from the violence.
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