When reports began to emerge Wednesday night that the murderous leader of the Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram was dead, many Nigerians dismissed them immediately.
Over the years, the Nigerian military had announced the killing of that leader, Abubakar Shekau, several times before. And then he would show up online weeks later, taunting his supposed killers in video diatribes.
But this time feels different. It wasn't the military announcing they had killed him.
Nor was his killing claimed in some slick video produced by Islamic State West Africa Province, the rival extremist group sometimes known as ISWAP that splintered off from his command five years ago.
Instead, reports gradually made their way to and then around Maiduguri, the capital of Nigeria's Borno state, by word-of-mouth. Then they trickled out to the world. The man who held the region in his violent grip for close to a decade was perhaps gone for real this time.
Shekau was best known for the 2014 kidnapping of the Chibok girls, 276 schoolgirls who were abducted from their dormitories at night and who Shekau later vowed he would "sell in the market."
Most of the Chibok girls were released, but over 100 are missing or remain in captivity, along with many other less famous but often even younger victims.
The reports that trickled out Thursday held that Shekau, besieged by ISWAP fighters in his forest stronghold and realizing that they wanted to take him alive, detonated a suicide vest, blowing himself up.
