Tuesday, January 13, 2015

Massacre in Nigeria

Two thousand people were murdered by fanatics. Will anyone march for them? From The Guardian:
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. (Read more.)
The testimony of a man who tried to escape. To quote:
On Saturday, another man, Yanaye Grema, said he was forced to hide for three days while the militants ransacked Baga. He eventually fled into the bush under the cover of darkness on Tuesday.

"For five kilometres (three miles), I kept stepping on dead bodies," he said.

Amnesty International said numerous eye-witnesses had described how the Boko Haram militants went from door to door, pulling out young men of fighting age and shooting them dead in the street. "It is based on these witnesses' testimonies that we are able to say that hundreds of civilians died in the attack, if not more, and thousands have been displaced," said the group's Nigeria researcher Daniel Eyre. (Read more.)
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