Last week President Goodluck Jonathan asked a high level team to look into the possibility of granting the militants a pardon.
The announcement was made via an audio statement believed to be from the group’s leader Abubakar Shekau.
In recent years Boko Haram has carried out a campaign of violence
across northern and parts of central Nigeria killing at least 2,000
people.
The group says its members are fighting to create an Islamic state in Nigeria’s predominantly Muslim north.
Mr Shekau said his group had done no wrong and so an amnesty would not be applicable to them.
It was the Nigerian government that was committing atrocities against Muslims, he said.
“Surprisingly, the Nigerian government is talking about granting us
amnesty. What wrong have we done? On the contrary, it is we that should
grant you [a] pardon,” AFP news agency quotes him as saying in the Hausa
language audio recording.
BBC Nigeria correspondent Will Ross says that northern religious and
political leaders have been urging President Jonathan to grant an
amnesty to the militants as they say the army’s response to the
insurgency is not bringing peace.
The amnesty panel was set up by the president last week and includes senior military representatives, presidential sources said.
The move surprised many as President Jonathan had dismissed the idea of amnesty and dialogue, our reporter says.
In 2009, then-Nigerian President Musa Yar Adua granted an amnesty to
thousands of militants wreaking havoc in the oil-rich Niger Delta in the
south.
The violence fell dramatically but there are worrying warnings of further unrest in the Delta, analysts say.
