Posted by By Ike Nnamdi, The Sun Reporter, New York on
A dozen Nigerians, including two former northern state governors, a university lecturer and an Islamic scholar are on the American watch list of suspected or known terrorist sympathisers compiled by the U.S authorities.
A dozen Nigerians, including two former northern state governors, a university lecturer and an Islamic scholar are on the American watch list of suspected or known terrorist sympathisers compiled by the U.S authorities.
Officials of the Homeland Security Department said the former chief executives had "during their tenure expressed sympathy for terrorist groups through the use of religion as a tool for recruiting extremists". The Islamic scholar runs a private Koranic school in Kano, while the lecturer teaches at one of the country's premier universities in the north.
Officials said utterances of some of those affected led to the administration warning its citizens of the presence of terror groups in Nigeria. Singling out two states as ' particularly volatile", a State Department statement said: 'Senior al-Qaeda leadership has expressed interest publicly in overthrowing the government of Nigeria. Links also were uncovered connecting Nigerians to al-Qaeda in 2004".
Hundreds of African nationals, mostly from Muslim leaning nations, are also on the list, with Ethiopia and Somalia topping the list. All those affected are not allowed to enter the U.S. The controversial list now has more than one million names, the American Civil Liberties Union has revealed. The citizens rights watchdog said it got the figure from a Justice Department report on the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center, which consolidates terrorist watch list information. The Center "had over 700,000 names in its database as of April 2007 and that the list was growing by an average of over 20,000 records per month," according to a report by the Justice Department Inspector General, the rights group said. "By those numbers, the list now has over one million names on it," the ACLU said in a statement.