BOKO HARAMS DEADLIEST MASSACRE 2,000 FEARED DEAD IN NIGERIA Hundreds of bodies – too many to count – remain strewn in the bush in Nigeria from an Islamic extremist attack that Amnesty International described as the “deadliest massacre” in the history of Boko Haram. Fighting continued on Friday around Baga, a town on the border with Chad where insurgents seized a key military base on 3 January and attacked again on Wednesday. “Security forces have responded rapidly, and have deployed significant military assets and conducted air strikes against militant targets,” said a government spokesman. District head Baba Abba Hassan said most victims are children, women and elderly people who could not run fast enough when insurgents drove into Baga, firing rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles on town residents. “The human carnage perpetrated by Boko Haram terrorists in Baga was enormous,” Muhammad Abba Gava, a spokesman for poorly armed civilians in a defence group that fights Boko Haram, told the Associated Press. He said the civilian fighters gave up on trying to count all the bodies. “No one could attend to the corpses and even the seriously injured ones who may have died by now,” Gava said. An Amnesty International statement said there are reports the town was razed and as many as 2,000 people killed. If true, “this marks a disturbing and bloody escalation of Boko Haram’s ongoing onslaught,” said Daniel Eyre, Nigeria researcher for Amnesty International. The previous bloodiest day in the uprising involved soldiers gunning down unarmed detainees freed in a 14 March 2014 attack on Giwa military barracks in Maiduguri city. Amnesty said then that satellite imagery indicated more than 600 people were killed that day. The attacks come five weeks away from presidential elections which are likely to trigger even more bloodshed. Already under a state of emergency, the three north-eastern states worst hit by Boko Haram asked the central government for more troops earlier this week. The government has said voting will take place across Borno state although the worsening insecurity means few international observers are likely to get clearance to oversee voting in an area that is traditionally opposition-supporting. Around 1.5 million people have been displaced by the violence, many of whom will not be able to vote in the polls under Nigeria’s current electoral laws. Boko Haram also appears to be regionalising the conflict, after threatening neighbouring Cameroon in a video earlier this week. The government has made no official comment on the alleged massacres. President Goodluck Jonathan skimmed security issues when he relaunched his re-election bid in front of thousands of cheering supporters in the economic capital, Lagos, on Thursday. The five-year insurgency killed more than 10,000 people last year alone, according to the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations. More than a million people are displaced inside Nigeria and hundreds of thousands have fled across its borders into Chad and Cameroon. Emergency workers said this week they are having a hard time coping with scores of children separated from their parents in the chaos of Boko Haram’s increasingly frequent and deadly attacks. Just seven children have been reunited with parents in Yola, capital of Adamawa state, where about 140 others have no idea if their families are alive or dead, said Sa’ad Bello, the coordinator of five refugee camps in Yola. He said he was optimistic that more reunions will come as residents return to towns that the military has retaken from extremists in recent weeks. Suleiman Dauda, 12, said he ran into the bushes with neighbours when extremists attacked his village, Askira Uba, near Yola last year. “I saw them kill my father, they slaughtered him like a ram. And up until now I don’t know where my mother is,” he told the Associated Press at Daware refugee camp in Yola. ADDITIONALLY: Boko Haram militants have killed dozens of people and burned down homes in the north-east Nigerian town of Baga in the past two days, in a second killing spree since seizing control there at the weekend, witnesses said. Two locals said the Islamist insurgents began shooting indiscriminately and burning buildings on Tuesday evening in raids on the civilian population that carried on into Wednesday. “I escaped with my family in the car after seeing how Boko Haram was killing people … I saw bodies in the street. Children and women, some were crying for help,” Mohamed Bukar said after fleeing to the state capital Maiduguri. The insurgency killed more than 10,000 people last year, according to a count by the Council on Foreign Relations in November. It is seen as the gravest threat to Nigeria, Africa’s biggest economy, and a headache for the country’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, ahead of an election on 14 February. Soldiers fled Baga over the weekend when the Sunni jihadist group overran a nearby army base. The district head of Baga, Abba Hassan, said on Thursday that at least 100 people were killed during an attack at the weekend when the group first took over the town on the edge of Lake Chad. Abubakar Gulama, who escaped without his family to Monguno, 40km away, said he crossed “many dead bodies on the ground” and that “the whole town was on fire“. Reuters TV footage showed scores of civilians waiting on sandy streets on the outskirts of Baga to catch buses out of town. Many carried the few possessions they had salvaged, such as bags of clothes and rolled up mattresses. In the last week, about 2,000 Nigerians and 500 Chadians have fled Boko Haram attacks in Chad’s Lake region, Chadian prime minister Kalzeubet Pahimi said on Wednesday. A source at a rights group in Maiduguri said some 10 women who snuck out of Baga a few days after the first attack had reported that their daughters aged between 10 and 20 had been kidnapped. The militants have been waging an insurgency to establish an Islamic state for more than five years. The number and scale of attacks rose sharply in 2014 after the government imposed emergency rule on the three worst-hit states in 2013, and the administration of President Jonathan has met growing criticism for failing to quash it. Jonathan defended his record on tackling Boko Haram at the launch of his election campaign and blamed opposition candidate Muhammadu Buhari for Nigeria’s ill-equipped army. Boko Haram has taken over or rendered ungovernable swaths of the north-east, especially Borno state where Baga is located. It has also launched attacks in Chad and Cameroon, while Chad has appealed for international aid to support the refugees coming across its border.
Posted on: Sun, 11 Jan 2015 01:39:16 +0000