Mohammed Yusuf
Mohammed Yusuf was the preacher in Maiduguri who built, over seven years, the movement its neighbours called Boko Haram, Western education is forbidden, from a mosque, a farm and the young men the state of Borno had nothing for, and who was shot by the police in their yard in July 2009, handcuffed and on camera, at the end of five days of fighting that killed some seven hundred; the organisation that grew back was worse than his. He was born in 1970 in Yobe state, studied in Chad and Niger and at the Salafist centres of Maiduguri, and by 2002 had his own mosque and school in the Railway quarter, where he preached that the Nigerian state, its constitution, its schools and its sciences were un-Islamic, that the earth was flat and rain did not come from evaporation, and that the sharia the northern states had adopted in 2000 was a fraud because the politicians who adopted it did not live by it. The group called itself the People Committed to the Prophet's Teachings; the name the city gave it stuck. He was arrested more than once and released, had friends in the Borno government, which had used his followers at election time, and took money from sources the security services argued about. The break came over motorcycle helmets. A police operation in June 2009 against members riding to a funeral without them ended in shooting, and on 26 July his followers attacked police stations in four states. The army retook Maiduguri on the 29th, shelling the mosque, and captured Yusuf at his father-in-law's. The soldiers handed him to the police, the police interrogated him on a mobile-phone video that circulated within days, and then shot him and announced he had been killed trying to escape. Nigeria's president promised an inquiry. The survivors regrouped under his deputy Abubakar Shekau in 2010 around the memory of the killing, and the bombings, the schoolgirls and the caliphate followed; some thirty-five thousand people and two million displaced are the count so far.
- Lived: 1970 CE – 2009 CE
- Nationality: Nigerian
- Roles: preacher, militant
