Boko Haram attack survivors flee as West criticised
One refugee fled through three miles of bodies from a Boko Haram attack, one thousand fled to an island on Lake Chad, and an Archbishop is demanding the West responds as it did to the Paris attacks.
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Nine days on, and more information has gradually emerged from the remote town of Baga in northeast Nigeria, as officials and journalists attempt to verify suggestions that as many as 2,000 people may have been killed in an attack by Boko Haram, an Islamist militia group.
Meanwhile, authorities from neighbouring Chad have asked the United Nations for its help to rescue around 1,000 people stranded on the island of Kangala, Lake Chad. They arrived there after fleeing the fighting.
Abubakar Gamandi, originally from Baga, told CNN that the people still trapped in the town are dying.
“?I have been in touch with them on the phone. They told me ?some of them are dying from lack of food, cold and malaria on the mosquito-infested island.”
The United Nations has said that it is attempting to assist some 7,000 Nigerian refugees in total who have recently fled fighting in north of the country, who fled to Chad.
Five kilometres of bodies
One man who hid for three days between a wall and a neighbours’ house amid the attack told AFP that he saw people who were killed as they fled.
“People fled into the bush while some shut themselves indoors. The gunmen pursued fleeing residents into the bush, shooting them dead,” he told AFP from Nigeria’s Borno state capital, Maiduguri.
He continued: “For five kilometres, I kept stepping on dead bodies until I reached Malam Karanti village, which was also deserted and burnt”.
A bomb strapped to a ’10-year-old’ suicide bomber also killed 16 people in Maiduguri, a city in the north of the country, at a marketplace on Saturday.
Paris questions
Meanwhile, a Nigerian archbishop accused the West of ignoring the threat that Islamist militants Boko Haram pose to the region and to the world.
Ignatius Kaigama, a Catholic Archbishop in central Nigeria, said that the international community ought to respond to the massacre of hundreds of Nigerians last week with the same determination that it has done in the wake of the Paris attacks.
“It is a monumental tragedy. It has saddened all of Nigeria. But… we seem to be helpless. Because if we could stop Boko Haram, we would have done it right away. But they continue to attack, and kill and capture territories… with such impunity,” he told the BBC’s Newsday programme.
Hundreds of people, and as many as 2,000, are reported to have died in the attacks on Baga and the surrounding region. The UN says 850,000 people have been displaced as a result of the conflict.