Nigeria: 2,000 feared killed in Boko Haram's 'deadliest massacre'

Amnesty International calls the killings
‘a disturbing and bloody escalation’ and
a local defence group says its
fighters
have given up trying to count the bodies 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.