YAOUNDE: Suspected Boko Haram gunmen have seized two Italian priests and a Canadian nun in northern Cameroon in the latest kidnapping of Westerners in the remote, insurgency-wracked corner of west Africa.
The attack occurred overnight on Friday in the small parish of Tchere, in the far north of Cameroon across the border from an area of northeastern Nigeria that serves as a base for the Islamist Boko Haram group.
A group of armed men pulled up at the parish shortly before midnight, according to Henri Djonyang, the region’s head cleric, which was confirmed by police.
Boko Haram militants kidnapped a priest and seven members of a French family in the same region last year, and both Djonyang and a Cameroonian police officer said they suspected the sect in the new abduction.
“We suspect they are still in Cameroonian territory. ... We knew that the Boko Haram Islamists were planning new kidnappings,” the officer said.
The gunmen ransacked the parish before seizing the priests and nun, according to news reports. The priests were identified as Giampaolo Marta, 47, and Gianantonio Allegri, 57, from the northern Italian city of Vicenza, and the nun as Gilberte Bussier.
Marta has been in Cameroon since 2004, while Allegri had returned to the country last September after working there through most of the 1990s, the Italian foreign ministry said.
The priest abducted last year and held for seven weeks, Georges Vandenbeusch, told AFP he knew the three victims well and was “aware that this could happen again”. He added that the Western religious workers must have been specifically targeted as two Cameroonian nuns in the area were “left alone”.
Djonyang said that the abduction followed the same pattern as that of Vandenbeusch: “They looted everything and then left.”
AFP
