France won’t negotiate with Boko Haram

France will not negotiate with Boko Haram gunmen who have taken a French family of seven hostage, the country’s Defence Minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, said yesterday.
The three adults and four children were kidnapped in Cameroon’s far north, near the Nigerian border in Borno State, last week. In a video posted online on Monday, the gunmen threatened to kill them, unless authorities in Nigeria and Cameroon released militants held there.
“We do not negotiate on that kind of basis, with this kind of groups,” Le Drian told RTL radio. “We will use all [other] possible means to ensure that these and other [French] hostages are freed.
“We do not play this bidding game because that’s terrorism,” he said, deploring the fact that children were involved.
The video, posted to YouTube and mentioned on a jihadist website, shows one of two French men reading a statement, with a woman in between them. Four children sit on the ground near them, flanked by two masked militants wearing camouflage uniforms and holding rifles.
A masked militant in front says in the video that Boko Haram kidnapped the French hostages, a family of three adults and four children who were taken from outside a national park in Cameroon’s Far North Region on February 19. A black banner in the background, bearing the images of the Quran flanked by two Kalashnikov assault rifles, also resembles a symbol previously used by Boko Haram.
The man says the kidnappings came due to the French military intervention in northern Mali, where its troops have fought with Malian soldiers against Islamic extremists who took over the north in the months following a coup last year. The man also threatens the Nigerian and Cameroonian governments, calling on them to release their imprisoned members.
“Let the French president know that he has launched war against Islam and we are fighting him everywhere,” the man says in Arabic. “Let him know that we are spread everywhere to save our brothers.”
The man threatens to kill the French hostages if the group’s demands are not met.
The Associated Press could not immediately confirm the video’s authenticity on Monday, though it shares similarities with some Boko Haram propaganda videos published in the past.
However, in this video, the man speaks entirely in Arabic, while other Boko Haram videos have its leader Abu Bakr Shekau also speaking Hausa. Boko Haram has not published a video featuring hostages before. The video appears to have been filmed outside, as prayer mats hung in the background sway in a breeze.