Girl Refuses To Explode Bomb Belt In Market

Girl Refuses To Explode Bomb Belt In Market

A 13-year-old girl has said she was made to wear a bomb belt and taken to a market in Nigeria by Boko Haram extremists but refused to detonate the device.

Zahara'u Adam said her father gave her to the Islamist group, but she told her captors she did not want to be a suicide bomber.

She allowed them to strap the bomb on her because they threatened to bury her alive.

She was taken to a market in Kano, Nigeria's second largest city in the north, with two other girls, who detonated the bombs.

Four people were killed in the explosion on 10 December.

Zahara'u said she was too scared to detonate the bomb when she saw the aftermath of what her counterparts had done.

Injured by the blasts, the girl found her way to a hospital where police arrested her while she was receiving treatment.

She was presented to journalists by police and instructed to recount how the militants allegedly forced her to take part in the attack - a move police hope will boost public awareness of the group's tactics.

"My father took us to the bush which was surrounded by gunmen, I was asked if I want to go to heaven, when I answered they said I have to go for a suicide mission and if I attempt to run, they will kill me," she recounted at a press conference.

"So from there we were sent to Kano. When we came to Kano market, one of us said we should go separately, but I refused.

"After my friend detonated her own I was wounded."

There was no way to independently verify her story and she had no lawyer present.

Boko Haram has been fighting for five years to establish an Islamist state in Nigeria's northeast.

The group has increasingly used female suicide bombers.

Australian house where eight children killed to be demolished

 Children attend a church service for eight children who were killed in the Cairns suburb of Manoora, December 21, 2014. Eight children have been killed in the northern Australian city of Cairns, police said on Friday, in what several media outlets reported was a mass stabbing.

SYDNEY - The house where an Australian mother allegedly killed eight children, most of them her own, will likely be demolished in keeping with indigenous culture to make way for a memorial, a government official said on Monday.

The fate of the house in the tropical northern city of Cairns was being discussed while a judge denied a request to transfer the murder case against 37-year-old Raina Mersane Ina Thaiday to Queensland state's Mental Health Court.

Thaiday is the mother of the four boys and three of the girls who were slain. The eighth child was her niece.

The Queensland government agreed to the demolition of the home because of the horrific nature of the killings and in keeping with indigenous cultural beliefs, Queensland MP Gavin King said.

"After extensive consultation we will remove the house behind me," King said as he spoke to the media in a park where the dead children used to play.

King said the government would liaise with the community on what form a memorial would take.

Thaiday was charged on Sunday with eight counts of murder over the deaths of the children, aged between two and 14 years.

Magistrate Alan Comans declined a request from Thaiday's lawyer, Steven MacFarlane, to have the case moved to the Mental Health Court. Comans said during a brief hearing at the Cairns Magistrates Court on Monday it was too soon for such a request.

No plea was entered at the hearing on behalf of Thaiday, who remains under police guard in hospital. She is being treated for stab wounds.

MacFarlane said he was not sure how long his client would remain in hospital, where she is also awaiting psychiatric assessment.

Police have asked that media abide by the cultural protocols of the indigenous Torres Strait Islander community, to which the family belongs, and withhold the names and photos of the dead children.

Torres Strait Islanders, a group of indigenous Australians viewed as distinct from the broader Aboriginal community, believe the spirit of a dead person must be sent along its journey or it might stay and disturb remaining family members.

The spirit is helped on this journey by a refusal to speak the deceased's name for a long period.

Hmmmm......R.IP