ABUJA, Feb 17 – Suspected Boko Haram terrorists killed more than 100 people in an attack on a village in Nigeria, a local senator said on Sunday, reported AFP.
The attackers stormed the village in Nigeria’s restive northeastern Borno state on Saturday, slaughtering scores of civilians and sending many others fleeing.
“A hundred and six people, including an old woman, have been killed by the attackers, suspected to be Boko Haram gunmen,” senator Ali Ndume told AFP.
“Sixty of the dead have been buried while the rest are awaiting burial,” he said, adding the attacks in the area were becoming “deadlier and more frequent by the day.”
The raid took place on Saturday in the mostly Christian village of Izghe in Borno, which has been under emergency rule since May last year in a bid to stop an Islamist rebellion that has claimed thousands of lives since 2009.
A local farmer who escaped by scaling the fence of his house and crawling on his belly for 40 minutes said the attackers had gone door-to-door looking for those hiding in their houses.
A group of gunmen in military uniforms Saturday night attacked Izge village, which is located in the southern part of the restive state, Xinhua quoted Commissioner of Police Lawan Tanko as saying.
According to Tanko, the attackers threw home-made bombs on roofs and shot indiscriminately at the villagers.
He said the security agency was still compiling casualties figure.
But other security sources said some 90 corpses were found at the village, which shares a border with Gwoza local government area, a place in the northeastern state where killings were recorded in the past.
The attackers threw improvised explosive devices (IEDs) on houses and other structures in the village while people were asleep, thereby killing and injuring scores of people, said a security source.
Adamu Izge, a resident of the village, said his father-in-law was also killed by the ruthless attackers while narrating the ordeal of the villagers in the night attack.
Some other villagers were burnt beyond recognition, the resident said.
Borno state, one of the three northeastern states in Nigeria under an emergency rule, is the headquarters of Boko Haram, a sect which has killed thousands of local and foreign citizens in its four-and-half years of insurgency in the West African country.
Last year, the US government named Boko Haram and Ansaru, a splinter group, as foreign terrorist groups, with an aim to join the Nigerian government to curtail the activities of the sect. –AFP, IANS
