The death toll from an attack by militants on a village in northeast Nigeria has risen to 69, security sources and residents said yesterday.
Fighters believed to be from the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) faction shot and ran over residents with vehicles in the assault on the remote village of Felo on Tuesday.
The death toll rose from 59 after 10 more bodies were discovered in the countryside around the herding community, the sources said.
Photo: AFP
“They actually killed 69 persons. More bodies were discovered scattered on the open expanse,” a senior military officer said.
Ibrahim Liman, a member of a government-backed anti-militant militia, provided the same overall figure.
“The bodies were strewn over a large area as the insurgents pursued their victims, shooting them and crushing them with their vehicles,” he said.
A community leader, who asked not to be named, said that the attackers had mown down the 69 “men and children” as they watched over their cattle at a watering hole outside the village.
“Our people were caught off guard by the gunmen who surrounded them,” the leader said. “It is an open field with nowhere to hide. They couldn’t escape; they couldn’t outrun the vehicles.”
Local leaders had earlier said that the attack was thought to be in reprisal for the killing of militants by a community self-defense group formed to stop cattle thefts.
Northeast Nigeria has been wracked by a decade-long Islamist insurgency that has left at least 36,000 dead and displaced about 2 million.
The ISWAP is a splinter faction that broke away from Boko Haram in 2016. It has intensified attacks against the military in the last two years, repeatedly carrying out deadly strikes against soldiers.
Over the past few months, there has been an increase in attacks on civilians blamed on the group.
The area where the latest attack took place, about 80km from regional capital Maiduguri, has been repeatedly targeted by the militants.
The authorities sent more than 100 militia and local hunters to help defend against the assaults.
In other news, the Nigerian Federal Ministry of Health said that 50 percent to 60 percent of 979 “mysterious” deaths in Kano, the country’s second-largest city, were linked to COVID-19, with most happening in a single week in April.
Similar investigations are under way in eight other states that have reported unexplained deaths.
Additional reporting by the Guardian
Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg was deported from Israel yesterday, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, the day after the Israeli navy prevented her and a group of fellow pro-Palestinian activists from sailing to Gaza. Thunberg, 22, was put on a flight to France, the ministry said, adding that she would travel on to Sweden from there. Three other people who had been aboard the charity vessel also agreed to immediate repatriation. Eight other crew members are contesting their deportation order, Israeli rights group Adalah, which advised them, said in a statement. They are being held at a detention center ahead of a
A Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the US at Detroit airport, the second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material, authorities said on Monday. The scientist is accused of shipping biological material months ago to staff at a laboratory at the University of Michigan. The FBI, in a court filing, described it as material related to certain worms and requires a government permit. “The guidelines for importing biological materials into the US for research purposes are stringent, but clear, and actions like this undermine the legitimate work of other visiting scholars,” said John Nowak, who leads field
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
RSS