Boko Haram leader says ruling Nigerian town by Islamic law

 

The leader of Nigeria's Islamist group Boko Haram said his fighters were now ruling the captured northeastern town of Gwoza "by Islamic law", in the first video to state a territorial claim in more than five years of violent insurrection.

The Nigerian military denied Boko Haram had taken control of the town during fighting over the past week, although security sources and some witnesses said police and military there had been pushed out.

Abubakar Shekau's forces have killed thousands since launching an uprising in 2009, and are seen as the biggest security threat to the continent's leading energy producer.

British Ebola victim flown home as Congo finds new outbreak

A British man infected with the Ebola virus is loaded into an Royal Air Force (RAF) ambulance after being flown home on a C17 plane from Sierra Leone, at Northolt air base outside London, August 26, 2014.

A British medical worker was flown home from West Africa on Sunday after becoming the first Briton infected in an Ebola epidemic, and a separate new outbreak of the disease was detected in Democratic Republic of Congo.

A specially adapted Royal Air Force cargo plane picked up the male healthcare worker in Sierra Leone on Sunday after British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond authorized his repatriation for treatment.

The Department of Health said the patient - whose identity has not been disclosed - was "not currently seriously unwell". The man will be transported to an isolation unit at the Royal Free Hospital in London.

Boko Haram seizes villages, towns

Kano - Boko Haram on Tuesday attempted to blow up a bridge on the Nigerian border with Cameroon after overrunning a town and sending residents and soldiers fleeing, police and locals said.

A Cameroon police officer stationed in the far north town of Fotokol told AFP that the militants tried to destroy the bridge, which serves as the border crossing with Gamboru Ngala in Nigeria.

Boko Haram stormed Gamboru Ngala early on Monday and by evening had taken over the police station, a military barracks and vocational training centre, where they had based themselves, locals said.

MSF offers limited help in DRC Ebola outbreak

Kinshasa - Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF), the leading organisation in fighting Ebola, said on Tuesday it could provide only limited support to tackle a new outbreak in Democratic Republic of Congo as it was already overstretched by the worst ever epidemic.

Congo declared an Ebola outbreak on Sunday and announced plans to quarantine the area around the town of Djera where a high number of suspected cases has been reported. It is Congo's seventh outbreak since the deadly haemorrhagic fever was discovered in 1976 in the same isolated northwestern jungle province, Equateur.

Nigeria troops cross into north Cameroon after Boko Haram attacks base

Around 480 Nigerian soldiers crossed into Cameroon after Boko Haram militants operating along the border between the two nations attacked a military base and police station, authorities in Cameroon said on Tuesday.

The apparent retreat across the border may suggest Boko Haram is having some success at chasing Nigerian forces out of towns they are defending along the hilly frontier with Cameroon.

The soldiers crossed to the Cameroon town of Fotokol in the Far-North region after fighting broke out when the Islamist militants attacked a base and police station in Gamboru in neighboring northeastern Nigeria, Cameroon Ministry of Defense spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Didier Badjeck said.