Boko Haram bomber of media offices sentenced to life imprisonment in Nigeria

A Boko Haram member who was arrested last year after bombing three media offices in Nigeria's northern state of Kaduna was sentenced to life imprisonment on Friday by a Federal High Court in Abuja, capital city of the West African country. Mustapha Umar, the self-confessed terror group member, was accused of having driven a car laden with improvised explosive devices into the premises of SOJ Plaza, housing three media offices - ThisDay Newspapers, The Moment Newspapers and The Sun Newspapers - in northwest Kaduna State on April 26, 2012. Officials said three persons were killed while many sustained various degrees of injury in the incident. During his trial in court, Umar had pleaded not guilty to the allegation but the court placed heavy reliance on a recorded interview which he granted to investigators during interrogations. The Nigerian high court noted that as members of the fourth estate of the realm, nobody should be allowed to muzzle the press, thereby dismissing the convict's reasons for attacking ThisDay Newspapers which, he said, was because the media organization was denigrating Islam's Prophet Mohammed. Thereafter, Justice Ademola Adeniyi slammed a life jail term on the terrorist, noting the state of mind of the convict with which the terrorism attack was planned, coordinated and orchestrated reinforced the court's determination to remove him (the convicted bomber) from the public for life. The bomber is to serve his jail term with a hard labor, according to the judgement. The court also ordered one-million-U.S.-dollar compensation to families of the incident's casualties. The case is the first conviction recorded under Nigeria's amended Terrorism Prevention Act of 2011. On Wednesday, the United States named Boko Haram and another splinter group called Ansaru as foreign terrorist organizations and slapped sanctions on them. The Boko Haram sect poses the biggest security threat in the West African country. Thousands of people have been killed since it launched the insurgency in 2009. It seeks to enshrine the Islamic sharia law into the constitution and declares war against the Western education.