MAIDUGURI, Nigeria (Reuters) – Suspected Boko Haram insurgents rounded up and shot dead dozens of people in a raid in a town in northeast Nigeria on Wednesday, military and local sources said, part of a resurgence of attacks in Borno state in the past month.
“Many people were killed,” said a military source. The casualty figure “may be very high,” he said.
Alhaji Habib Kakero, a former local official in the town of Kukawa near Lake Chad, said the suspected Islamist militants attacked in the early evening and killed many people.
Bashir Ahmed, a member of a local self-defence group, said he had been told by a colleague who fled the attack and then returned to the town that they found 97 bodies, some badly charred because the attackers had set houses ablaze.
There was no immediate official comment from the security forces nor a confirmed death toll.
Boko Haram insurgents have killed thousands of people and left about 1.5 million others displaced in a six-year-old insurgency to create an Islamic caliphate in the northeast of Africa’s most populous nation and top oil producer.
At the end of last year the group controlled an area roughly the size of Belgium but they lost huge chunks of territory when the military went on the offensive in the months before of a presidential election in March.
By then, the military said it had taken back all but three out of 20 local government areas previously controlled by the Islamist militants.
But the last month has seen a resurgence in attacks, many in Maiduguri, the biggest city in northeast Nigeria.
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