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Kano – At least 14 people were killed and several others injured by Boko Haram gunmen in a Christmas Day attack on a village in north-eastern Nigeria, vigilantes said on Saturday.
Attacking astride bicycles, the jihadists invaded Kimba village in flashpoint Borno state around 2200hrs on Friday, opening fire on residents and torching their homes.
“The gunmen killed 14 people and burnt the whole village before they fled,” Mustapha Karimbe, a civilian assisting the military in fighting Boko Haram, said.
“Not a single house was spared in the arson,” another vigilante, Musa Suleiman, said after visiting the razed village.
Hundreds of Kimba residents fled to Biu nearby, where they were put up in a refugee camp already brimming with people running from Boko Haram.
The attack comes just days before Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari’s self-imposed deadline to stamp out the group expires on December 31 and in the same week he said that Nigeria has “technically” defeated the jihadists.
Buhari took office in May vowing to end the six-year insurgency that has killed over 17,000 people and spooked much-needed investors in Africa’s largest economy and foremost oil producer.
Nigerian troops have won back territory from Boko Haram, but in response the jihadists have increasingly resorted to suicide bombers – many of them young children – to wage war for an independent Islamic state.
The militants have damaged what little infrastructure existed in the country’s underdeveloped north at a time when the government is facing a cash crunch as a result of the free-falling oil price.
A week ago, Boko Haram killed 30 people and injured 20 others in raids on three villages near the home of the Nigerian army chief.
The jihadists have allied themselves with the Islamic State group, but experts doubt the scale and scope of the collaboration.
Still, there are growing fears that a once localised hardline Muslim movement is morphing into a regional jihadist threat as Boko Haram launches attacks on Nigeria’s neighbours Chad, Cameroon and Niger.
Tens of people were killed in an explosion at a gas plant in southern Nigeria, the presidency said on Friday, with one journalist putting the death toll at 100.
The blast occurred on Thursday when a truck was discharging butane gas at the facility in Nnewi town in Anambra state as a crowd of customers refilled gas bottles on Christmas Eve, residents said.
President Muhammadu Buhari’s office said “tens of people” who had been looking forward to their Christmas celebrations had been killed, without giving a precise toll.
One local journalist at the scene, David Onwuchekwa, said: “I saw around 100 charred corpses.”
Most of the dead were customers at the plant or people who lived nearby, he added.
Carl Ofuonye, another local journalist, said the blast had been sparked when the truck exploded while discharging gas.
“So many people were in the building, workers at the plant, people who came to buy gas,” he said. “A woman and a child in a nearby building died.”
Many others were being treated for burns at nearby hospitals.
“I saw flames but I didn’t know (what was going on) and started running and then I heard an explosion,” the wife of the manager of a nearby construction site told local TV station Television Continental. “Even while running the fire . . . burnt me all over.” – AFP
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