Nigeria's Supreme Court on Friday quashed the conviction of a Lebanese national who had been sentenced to life in prison for conspiring to import weapons, purportedly on behalf of Hizbullah.

The five judges of the country's top court unanimously ruled that prosecutors made a crucial technical error and should have tried Talal Ahmad Roda in the northern city of Kano, where he was arrested, rather than the capital Abuja.

Nigeria's Boko Haram militants are a threat beyond Nigeria's borders and the crisis requires a "collective, effective and decisive response" by African nations, the African Union's Commission chief said Friday.

"Terrorism, in particular the brutality of Boko Haram against our people, are a threat to our collective safety, security and development. This has now spread to the region beyond Nigeria and requires a collective, effective and decisive response," AU commission chair Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma said in a speech opening a two-day summit of African leaders in Addis Ababa.

The African Union called Friday for a regional five-nation force of 7,500 troops to defeat the "horrendous" rise of Nigeria's Boko Haram Islamist militants.

The call for collective action came as leaders of the 54-member bloc opened their two-day annual summit in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, where they were addressing a string of crises across the continent.

Nigeria on Thursday confirmed that the H5N1 strain of bird flu has spread from seven to 11 states within a week, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of poultry but no human cases.

Agriculture Minister Akinwumi Adesina told an emergency meeting on the outbreak that "as of yesterday (Wednesday) a total of 11 states, have reported positive cases".

Nigerian fighter jets have bombed the northeast town of Malam Fatori, controlled by Boko Haram Islamists, the military said Thursday. 

Witnesses and some media reports said troops and air force planes from neighboring Chad were involved in the operation on Nigerian soil but Abuja neither confirmed nor denied the claim.

More than 14,000 people fleeing Boko Haram violence in northeast Nigeria have streamed into Chad since the beginning of 2015, according to a United Nations report on Wednesday. 

The report by the U.N.'s Office for the Coordination for Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) put the daily arrivals rate at 774 and said it expected 30,000 refugees to arrive in the country this year.

All that's left of the Muslim neighborhood in Madakiya, in Nigeria's northwestern Kaduna state, are decomposing bricks and graffiti-covered walls standing in fields of charred grass.

Muslims and Christians once lived together in the village but Madakiya's entire Muslim population fled to a nearby town in rioting after the 2011 presidential election.

Nigeria must accept it cannot defeat Boko Haram fighters alone and work with regional armies in a new multinational force, the United Nations envoy for the Sahel region said Wednesday.

More than 13,000 people have been killed and more than one million made homeless by Boko Haram violence since 2009.

Thousands of people fleeing the latest Boko Haram violence have poured into the embattled Nigerian city of Maiduguri, putting pressure on camps for the displaced as rescue workers try to cope with the influx.

A group of 5,000 people, most of them women and children, reached the Borno state capital on Monday after escaping the Islamists' weekend takeover of the nearby town of Monguno, officials said.

Lying on his side, Moussa Zira shows the gaping wound where the bullet entered his thigh the night Boko Haram came to his village near the now devastated northern Nigerian town of Baga.

He pretended to be dead before escaping in a dug-out canoe across Lake Chad to a refugee camp. He is still in terrible pain and has a limp, but Moussa Zira knows it is a miracle he survived what many fear was the worst massacre of the Islamists' bloody insurgency.