“Illegal mining funded terror”: Two of Nigeria’s most wanted jihadists get life

For a man once described by Nigeria’s national security adviser as the mastermind of one of the country’s most brazen jailbreaks, Mahmud Usman’s surrender in a Federal High Court courtroom Monday was almost anticlimactic.

Dressed in the same defiance that had carried him through nearly a year of trial, the self-styled “Emir” of Ansaru – al-Qaeda’s Nigerian franchise – simply asked for forgiveness.

“I am a man who has 19 children, and I have been suffering this health condition,” Usman told Justice Emeka Nwite, referring to his arthritis. “I am pleading, my lord, under your mercy, to please assist me in our situation. I am pleading seriously.”

Standing beside him was Abubakar Abba, known by his followers as Malam Mamuda, described by prosecutors as Ansaru’s deputy leader and chief of staff. Both men pleaded guilty Monday to all 32 charges against them – terrorism, terrorism financing, kidnapping for ransom, fabricating improvised explosive devices and illegal mining to fund terrorism – closing a case that had dragged since their arrest last year.

In the process, they pulled back the curtain on one of the least-examined engines of Nigeria’s insurgency economy: illegal mining.

The case had not always looked headed for a guilty plea. When Usman and Abba were first arraigned on September 11, 2025, both pleaded not guilty – except on a single count, where Usman admitted to illegal mining for the purpose of financing terrorism and procuring arms. Justice Nwite convicted him on that count alone and sentenced him to 15 years, while the remaining 31 charges went to trial.

That trial nearly collapsed before it began. Defence lawyer Bala Dakum complained that the State Security Service (SSS) was denying him access to his clients to prepare their case, stalling proceedings for months.

When the case resumed in March, prosecutors called an SSS operative using the codename “Triple A,” who testified that both defendants had confessed to receiving weapons training in Libya and maintaining links to terrorist networks across the Sahel and Maghreb.

According to the witness, the men admitted training in improvised explosive device manufacture under instructors from Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria, and said Usman had confessed to leading Ansaru while both admitted membership and involvement in kidnappings and illegal mining.

Then, at a hearing on July 9, Abba told the court he wanted to reconsider his plea. Justice Nwite adjourned the case until Monday to let him decide. When proceedings resumed, Dakum told the court his clients had consulted and were ready to change course.

“After having consulted with the defendants, my lord, they have agreed and are ready to change their plea,” he said. Prosecutor David Kaswe did not object, and after all 32 counts were read aloud a second time, both men pleaded guilty to each one in turn.

Dakum asked the court for mercy, describing Usman as a 50-year-old father of 19 who suffers from arthritis and hopes to return to school, and Abba as a 34-year-old father of three who is his family’s breadwinner and also suffers from arthritis.

Both men, he said, claimed they had been coerced into joining Ansaru and were willing to share intelligence with security agencies on the group’s networks and financing.

“The essence of punishment is not only to punish but to correct and serve as a deterrent,” Dakum argued.

Justice Nwite ultimately convicted both men on all 32 counts, sentencing them to life imprisonment on counts 30 and 31 – which charged them with using proceeds from illegal mining in Boko village, in Zamfara State’s Anka district, and ransoms collected from kidnappings in Katsina and Niger states, to procure arms and explosives between 2015 and 2025. He imposed 20-year terms on the remaining 30 counts, to run from the men’s arrest dates.

The SSS called the sentence “too light” and said it would appeal, alleging that kidnappers holding pupils and teachers abducted from Oriire in Oyo State for nearly 60 days had demanded the two commanders’ unconditional release – and beheaded two teachers when the government refused.

“It wouldn’t be fair to see two men beheaded and their families made to live with the losses without adequately bringing the culprits to book,” a senior DSS official said, according to the News Agency of Nigeria.

The mining connection

Formed between late 2011 and early 2012 by defectors from Boko Haram with the blessing of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the Ansaru group collapsed into dormancy within about a year of its founding, only to resurface after 2019 in Nigeria’s northwest – a region with none of the oil wealth that funds militancy in the Niger Delta, but with something more portable: unregulated gold deposits scattered across Zamfara, Katsina and Niger states. The group reaffirmed its allegiance to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in 2022.

Researchers who track the region say Ansaru exploited that terrain by deliberately blurring the line between jihadism and ordinary banditry — arming and provisioning criminal gangs already extorting the makeshift mining camps that dot the northwest, while distributing fertiliser, food and gifts to communities in Kaduna, Katsina and Zamfara to buy loyalty.

The mining camps themselves have long been a battleground: gunmen killed at least 45 illegal gold miners in a raid on Bindim village, Zamfara, in 2016, and at least 20 more in an attack on a mining site in Maru local government area this past April – a reminder that the mines are as often crime scenes as financing streams.

Ribadu, the national security adviser, said the two men were captured in a “high-risk, intelligence-led, multi-agency operation” conducted between May and July 2025, describing Usman as the coordinator of terrorist sleeper cells nationwide and the mastermind behind the 2022 jailbreak at Kuje prison in Abuja, where more than 600 inmates – including 64 suspected Boko Haram members – escaped.

Abba, trained in Libya between 2013 and 2015, was named alongside him in charges tied to the 2013 kidnapping of French engineer Francis Collomp, the 2019 abduction of a Daura traditional title-holder, the kidnapping of the Emir of Wawa, and a 2022 attack on the Nigerian Army’s Wawa Cantonment in Niger State. Ribadu said the men’s networks extended into Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso.

An estimated 2.3 million people remain displaced by Boko Haram’s insurgency in Nigeria’s northeast alone, part of a broader toll of more than 3.6 million internally displaced people and 383,000 refugees in neighbouring countries, according to U.S. State Department figures.

Landmines and improvised explosives killed 411 civilians last year – the highest toll since 2020 and the sixth-highest of any country in the world. Further west, in the bandit-plagued northwest, researchers documented nearly 2,938 kidnappings between mid-2024 and mid-2025 alone, while in Katsina state, investigators verified more than 294 killings and 306 abductions over the two years to May 2025. In Plateau State, farmer-herder violence displaced roughly 65,000 people in less than two year.