Terror sect Boko Haram is said to be planning to kidnap foreigners in the northeast.
The extremists, according to the United States and Britain, are targeting Western foreign workers in the Bama area of Borno State, close to the Cameroon border.
Both countries said in separate travel advice that the affected area was “along the Banki-Kumshe axis”, which is near the border with Cameroon.
The US embassy in Abuja said in a message to its nationals that the report was ‘credible’.
Boko Haram has kidnapped thousands of women and children, including more than 200 Chibok school girls.
At least 20,000 people have been killed since 2009, but abductions of foreigners have been rare.
There was a spate of kidnappings of foreign workers in the wider north from 2011 to 2013, claimed by a Boko Haram splinter group, Ansaru, which was more ideologically aligned to Al-Qaeda.
The leader of Ansaru, Khalid al-Barnawi, has been charged with the abduction and murder of foreign workers, among them an Italian, a Briton, a German, Greek, Lebanese and Syrians.
Most were engineers or construction workers. International aid workers now account for the majority of foreign nationals in the northeast, with most of them based in the Borno State.
Hundreds of thousands of people in the Lake Chad region require urgent food aid as a result of the conflict, which has made more than 2.6 million people homeless and ravaged farmland.
Boko Haram has been pushed out of strongholds by military efforts but continues to control parts of the northeast.
That has challenged aid groups’ efforts to address a hunger crisis that the United Nations says has left 4.7 million people in urgent need of food aid.
Nigeria is part of what the U.N. has called the largest humanitarian crisis since the world body was founded in 1945. The World Food Program has warned of aid cuts if more help doesn’t arrive. Click to signup for FREE news updates, latest information and hottest gists everyday
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