At least 35 people were killed today Monday Oct 8th when JTF soldiers opened fire after a bomb blast
struck their convoy in the northeastern city of Maiduguri,
nurses at the hospital that received the bodies said.
The nurses in the Umaru Shehu hospital said 30 of the dead
were in civilian clothes, while another five wore military
uniforms. Militants of the Boko Haram Islamist sect,
headquartered in Maiduguri, sometimes wear civilian clothes.
"They brought in so many dead bodies. They were more than 30
civilians, in civilian dress. We counted five dead soldiers as
well," a nurse, who declined to be named, said. Most had died of
gunshot wounds, she added.
Boko Haram is waging an insurgency against President
Goodluck Jonathan's government with the avowed aim of reviving
an ancient Islamic kingdom in majority Muslim northern Nigeria.
Styled on the Afghan Taliban, the sect's purported leader
Abubakar Shekau has said he wants to impose sharia, Islamic law,
on the country of 160 million people, around half of whom are
Christians and the other half Muslim. His movement has become
the number one security threat to Africa's top energy producer.
Borno state security spokesman Sagir Musa said he could not
confirm or deny the casualty toll, but he admitted troops had
opened fire after a bomb they suspected to be remotely detonated
wounded two of them in a patrol.
He said the military would give a statement on Wednesday
morning.
Nigerian forces launched a fresh operation against Boko
Haram over the weekend, killing 30 of its members, including a
senior commander, and arrested 10 others in a raid on the
northeastern city of Damaturu, they said on Monday.
A crackdown on the group this year has had mixed results,
weakening it but also pushing it into new areas south of its
heartland. Northerners complain that heavy-handed police and
military tactics, including indiscriminate killings and arrests,
have made new recruits for the sect.
GUN BATTLES
Lieutenant Eli Lazarus, a spokesman for joint military and
police forces in northeastern Yobe state, said in a statement
that they had conducted cordon and search operations at a
suspected Boko Haram hideout in Damaturu on Sunday and "engaged
in a gun battle with the suspected terrorists".
"About 30 suspected Boko Haram terrorists were killed in the
battle which lasted several hours ... The notorious one-eyed
Bakaka, the field commander of Boko Haram in Damaturu and a
close associate of Abubakar Shekau, was killed," he said.
Ten others were arrested and "are presently assisting
investigators to track other senior members of the terrorist
group", he added. Three homemade bombs, six assault rifles, 90
rounds of ammunition and several knives were seized, he said.
There was no immediate comment from Boko Haram.
Source: Reuters
No comments:
Post a Comment