Suspected Boko Haram gunmen shot dead seven people and injured five more in a weekend attack on a wedding party in northeastern Nigeria, police said on Monday.

Two gunmen on a motorcycle opened fire in the mainly Christian village of Tashan Alade, 230 kilometers (over 140 miles) from the Borno state capital Maiduguri, on Saturday, said police commissioner Lawan Tanko.

A Lebanese factory owner who was kidnapped by gunmen in the north Nigerian city of Kano has been freed after a search, police said on Friday.

Police spokesman Magaji Musa Majia said that officers found Hassan Zein, the owner of the MC Plastics facility, around 0800 GMT on the outskirts of the city.

The leader of Nigeria's Boko Haram Islamists, Abubakar Shekau, has claimed a daring December 20 raid on a military barracks in the restive northeast, in a video obtained by Agence France Presse Friday.

The insurgents stormed the barracks in the town of Bama in a convoy of trucks before sunrise, opened fired on the soldiers inside then torched the compound. Several witnesses said the gunmen kidnapped soldiers as well as women and children.

A military offensive in northeast Nigeria that killed more than 50 Islamist rebels has destroyed four villages and left corpses scattered in bushes, with some civilians among the dead, witnesses said Tuesday.

The defense ministry has said the operation was launched in response to an attack Friday by Boko Haram insurgents on an army barracks in the town of Bama in Borno state, the epicenter of the Islamist conflict.

The Internal Security Forces Intelligence Bureau arrested on Monday two Lebanese nationals linked to a counterfeiting gang, reported the National News Agency.

Investigations with the suspects later led to the discovery of a five-member Nigerian counterfeiting gang.

Gunmen kidnapped a Lebanese factory owner in Nigeria's second city of Kano on Monday in an attack that left two employees wounded by gunfire, police and witnesses said.

"I can confirm the kidnap of a Lebanese national by unknown gunmen from his factory in Sharada area this morning," Kano state police spokesman Magaji Majia told Agence France Presse.

Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan said Monday he had ordered a probe into a rash of allegations, including the creation of a political hit squad, levelled against him by former leader Olusegun Obasanjo.

Obasanjo, who served as president from 1999-2007, penned an open letter to Jonathan on December 2 that accused him of training a private militia to assassinate political rivals.

Nigeria's military has surrounded a village in the northeast to flush out Islamist rebels who fled there after reportedly snatching soldiers' wives and children during a daring attack on an army barracks nearby, witnesses told Agence France Presse Saturday.

Suspected Boko Haram fighters stormed the barracks in the town of Bama early on Friday, spraying it with bullets before torching the compound.

A Nigerian court on Friday sentenced the man behind a 2011 Christmas Day bombing to life in prison, in one of the highest profile convictions linked to the Boko Haram Islamist insurgency.

Rights group have been pressuring Nigeria to take more Boko Haram cases to court, saying the widely used tactic of rounding up suspected Islamists and holding them indefinitely violates domestic and international law.

Nigeria's police said Friday they had raided a home where 19 pregnant women were staying with plans to sell their newborns, in the latest discovery of a so-called baby factory.

The owner of the property, suspected of being a broker in a child trafficking ring, is on the run, said Geoffrey Ogbonna, police spokesman in southeastern Abia state.