Boko Haram massacre victims mostly women, children

Boko Haram massacre victims mostly women,
children
2015-01-10 12:50
Yola - Fighting continued on Friday for Baga, a
Nigerian town on the border with Chad, where
Islamic extremists seized a key military base on 3
January and attacked again on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, hundreds of bodies remain strewn in
the bush from the attack which Amnesty
International suggested on Friday is the "deadliest
massacre" in the history of Boko Haram.
"Security forces have responded rapidly, and have
deployed significant military assets and
conducted airstrikes against militant targets,"
Mike Omeri, the government spokesperson on the
insurgency, said in a statement.
Human carnage
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 spokesperson 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.
Condemnation
In Washington, US State Department
spokesperson Jen Psaki condemned the attacks.
"We urge Nigeria and its neighbours to take all
possible steps to address the urgent threat of
Boko Haram. Even in the face of these horrifying
attacks, terrorist organisations like Boko Haram
must not distract Nigeria from carrying out
credible and peaceful elections that reflect the will
of the Nigerian people," Psaki said in a statement.
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. Amnesty
said then that satellite imagery indicated more
than 600 people were killed that day.
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, Cameroon and
Nigeria.
Refugee camps
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 co-ordinator
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.