French Say Kidnapped Priest Was Moved to Nigeria

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/16/world/africa/french-say-kidnapped-priest-was-moved-to-nigeria.html

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ABUJA, Nigeria — The kidnappers of a French priest seized in northern Cameroon shouted for joy and fired celebratory shots in the air, one of his church superiors there said Friday, but only after crossing the border into Nigeria, in a region rife with members of the Islamist sect Boko Haram.

The priest, Georges Vandenbeusch, who was seized by gunmen in his remote rural parish late Wednesday, appears to be the latest victim of an intensifying Islamist campaign being waged against France for both financial and ideological reasons. His kidnapping by gunmen came less than two weeks after two French journalists were killed in northern Mali, where France recently fought Islamists linked to Al Qaeda, and the release of four French hostages in Niger, reportedly in exchange for some $34 million.

On Friday, President François Hollande of France said that Father Vandenbeusch, 42, had “surely” been taken to Nigeria, 12 miles away, suggesting that the gunmen were linked to Boko Haram, whose principal bases are now close to the Cameroon border in remote northeastern Nigeria.

Money seemed uppermost for the gunmen who burst into the Catholic mission at Nguetchewe, church officials there said. “They broke the door, they broke the windows, and they demanded money,” said Sister Françoise, one of two nuns on the premises with Father Vandenbeusch. “They threw everything on the ground,” she said in a telephone interview from Cameroon, and they spoke in English, Kanuri and Hausa, the languages of Boko Haram’s Nigerian stronghold.

The gunmen then broke down the door of the priest’s room as he was calling the French Embassy in Yaoundé, Cameroon’s capital, hundreds of miles away, said Henri Djonyang, the vicar general of Maroua, the regional capital. Shortly afterward the priest was seen being dragged, barefoot, by the gunmen toward their motorcycles, as they yelled at him to hurry up, Mr. Djonyang said in a telephone interview from Maroua.

When he arrived at the mission hours later, the doors had been smashed, the closets emptied and the offices looted, Mr. Djonyang said.

Father Vandenbeusch gave up a cosseted suburban sinecure outside Paris two years ago and ignored warnings from French officials to leave the area, according to the French news media. He had devoted himself to serving the refugees from Nigeria’s military offensive against Boko Haram, just across the border, Mr. Djonyang said.

“He wanted to serve the poor,” Mr. Djonyang said. “It was his love for Christ through the poor” that kept him in the dangerous region. Earlier this year, a vacationing French family was kidnapped nearby by Boko Haram and later released, reportedly for a ransom.

“He didn’t go to Cameroon because he loved taking risks; he went there to be close to his new parishioners,” said Jean-Grégoire Houlon, who replaced Father Vandenbeusch at the church in Sceaux, outside Paris. “He wasn’t hotheaded.”

<NYT_AUTHOR_ID> <p><em>Maia de la Baume contributed from Paris</em>