Bloody week in North, hundreds die in attacks

At least 600 people have been killed across some northern states in a resurgence of attacks within a space of one week. Except for the Zamfara incident, all the others bear the tell-tale signs of Boko Haram insurgent attack. As usual, Borno State set the precedence for the resurgence of deadly attacks that also maimed […]

At least 600 people have been killed across some northern states in a resurgence of attacks within a space of one week. Except for the Zamfara incident, all the others bear the tell-tale signs of Boko Haram insurgent attack. As usual, Borno State set the precedence for the resurgence of deadly attacks that also maimed hundreds. Within a span of 10 days, over 500 people were killed in the State alone.
Evidently, even before they extended their campaign to other parts of northern Nigeria, Boko Haram terrorists had wreaked havoc in at least seven local government areas of Borno that claimed the lives of many people and displaced over 40,000 in one of the councils.
The latest was on Tuesday, when a female suicide bomber blew herself up near a military checkpoint in Damboa local government area, killing four people.
Witnesses and vigilantes said the incident happened at Sabon Gari village, 110 kilometers from Maiduguri along Gombe road.
They said circumstances surrounding the attack indicated that the lady had wanted to target the military personnel that were manning the roadblock but could not make it.
Maikaho Abdu, a commercial driver, said apart from the suicide bomber, two civilian vigilantes, who were assisting military operatives and two other people died on the spot.
“The woman should be around 23 ‎years.  She injured many others. She strapped herself with the explosives and alighted from the vehicle some meters away from the checkpoint as if she had reached her destination,” Abdu said.
Friday, July 3, was indeed a deadly one in Borno following sporadic attacks by Boko Haram terrorists in southern, central and northern parts of the state.
The terrorists first killed at least 29 people in Mussa village in Askira Uba local government area in the southern part of the state, survivors and local vigilantes said.
Askira Uba is a border town between Borno and Adamawa states while Mussa village is 36 kms west of the border.
Sunday Wabba, chairman of Mussa Youth Development Association, said the attackers stormed the area around 1 pm and killed everyone in sight. “They operated till around 3 pm before they left,” he said.
It was gathered that troops later pursued the terrorists and succeeded in killing one.
While the attack in Mussa was on-going, a similar onslaught was also taking place in Zabarmari village of Jere local government area where more than 40,000 people were displaced.
Seven people were killed and more than 40 percent of the hitherto thriving farming community was destroyed, witnesses and survivors said.
The latest displacement increased the number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Maiduguri which stood at over 1.5 million, according to NEMA and other humanitarian agencies.
Though the Borno State government had taken some of the IDPs from Zabarmari back to the village, many others are still living with the relatives in the state capital.
On the same Friday, five female suicide bombers blew themselves up at a mosque at Muna garage in Maiduguri and environs and succeeded in killing no fewer than 40 people.
Much later that night, a group of Boko Haram fighters revisited Miringa village in Biu local government area in the southern part of Borno where they killed three people. The terrorists had earlier on Thursday trailed some of their ‘defecting members’ to the same village and killed 11.
A day earlier, two female suicide bombers wreaked havoc in Malari and near Alau villages in Konduga local government area in central Borno.
In the two separate missions at least 13 people, including the suicide bombers, while 21 others sustained injuries. But the police said 11 people died in the attacks.
Before then, there were attacks on June 30 and July 1 by terrorists in Kukawa and Monguno local government areas where they killed nearly 200 people.
Scores of people were reportedly injured while many houses and shops were destroyed and assorted food items and animals carted away.
At least 118 dead bodies were recovered within Kukawa and the nearby bushes after the terrorists attacked Muslim worshippers in mosques in the ancient town.
Haruna Kukawa, a member of the Borno State House of Assembly, said 21 of the dead bodies were recovered after three days of the attack. “Access to the town was difficult in the early days of the attack because the terrorists had planted explosives around the town. I am afraid that some people who escaped with bullet wounds might have died in the bush either because of blood loss or hunger,” Kukawa said.
In neighbouring Monguno local government, terrorists killed 48 people in Maisara 1 and Maisara 11.
The story was not very different in nearby Yobe State, where a suspected Boko Haram suicide bomber, who disguised as a worshipper last Sunday, detonated an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) at the Redeemed Christian Church of God, Potiskum, killing the pastor and five other people.
Yobe police spokesman Toyin Gbadeges said worshippers were the target of the bomber.
Similarly, Plateau State, deaths resulting from last Sunday’s twin bomb and gun attacks in Jos had climbed to more than 50 by Thursday, with about the same number of others injured, some to points of disability for life.
Much of Jos was winding up for the day, getting set to hit the bed for a restful night that fateful Sunday when two loud blasts, the first occurring at the popular and massively patronised Shagalinku Restaurant on the famous Bauchi Road about 9.25 pm and the second a few minutes later at a well-attended Tafsir in Jos city’s second most popular mosque, in Yan Taya, a neighboring community of the commercial hub of Jos Terminus Market.
“Two people came shooting, accompanied by one other who detonated a bomb,” a witness of the Yan Taya mosque attack recalled to Daily Trust Saturday from his sickbed at the Plateau Specialist Hospital where he was rushed to after the gun and bomb attacks.
The witness, Hassan Ahmed, a victim who sustained what looked like a grievous gunshot wound in his left arm, said that as far as he could recollect, two people got to the foregrounds of the mosque where there was a huge overflow of worshippers after the mosque ran out of space, and started shooting and apparently trying to make their way into the packed mosque for a third person who detonated a bomb before he could get to the preacher and presumed main target, Sheikh Yahaya Jingir.
Ahmed said: “These people came shooting in the air and at the people just outside the mosque and others that they could reach inside the mosque. Some people were getting up and some others were lying down to avoid the shots. In the midst of that I was shot in my left arm. I fell down and shortly afterwards I heard the explosion of bomb. I later learnt that a third person detonated the bomb while already in the mosque but not yet within reach of the Sheikh, killing himself and people that were close to him.”
All the victims of the mosque attack were male, but women, most of them staff, were affected at Shagalinku Restaurant where the first of the two bombing incidents happened. Umma Umar, a service girl, did not receive visible external injuries, but she was obviously not herself when Daily Trust Saturday met with her at her hospital bedside.
A relief worker and Plateau State director of First Aid Group Fitiyanu Islam of Nigeria, Abdullahi Dauda who explained her situation, said she suffered shock from the blast and needed to be hospitalised and be made to heal under expert hands.
Relating what she could recollect of the incident, Umma Umar said she heard an explosion but that she remembered nothing afterwards: “I heard ‘gboom,’ and I must have fallen down after the explosion but I can’t really remember anything that may have happened afterwards.”
While security agents had put casualty in Jos city’s twin explosions at 51 deaths by Wednesday, chances are that they were economical with the truth.
By Monday evening when the Plateau State government announced 44 deaths and attributing the figure to National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) and the police, Dauda of Fitiyanu Islam of Nigeria said the dead numbered 66, the official 44 plus 22 which Dauda said were not taken to any hospital.
Beyond the agony over the dead and the injured were losses suffered outside the terrorist attacks that bloody Sunday night in Jos. Some miscreants seized the disorder following the attacks to loot shops in the Yan Taya mosque neighbourhood. And what threatened to extend the carnage to the rest of Jos and possibly some other parts of Plateau State, the same rascally youths descended on two nearby churches:  a Cherubim and Seraphim Church building and a First Africa Mission of Nigeria church building.
While the bereaved and the injured were pondering dishearteningly over the twin blasts, the rest of Jos was troubled over a possible religious backlash of the destroyed churches until time and appeals from prominent individuals wore out the tension and Jos had recovered somewhat by the time of filing this report.
Such pathetic tales also trailed the Zaria attack, where score of workers, including teachers on verification exercise were killed by in a bomb blast. Among the dead were a nursing mother and her baby.
The corpse of 7-month-old baby that was glued to the back of his dead mother was one of those that were recovered by rescue workers and volunteers at the scene of the blast that claimed about 26 lives, while dozens were injured.
A witness, Tahir Musa, told our correspondent that despite the devastating nature of the attack, both the woman and her child were found glued to one another.
“It was a horrible sight. At first, we thought that the woman was alive. We attempted to remove the child from her back. It was during this attempt that we discovered that both of them were dead. It is really an unfortunate incident, and even for the sake of this nursing woman and her innocent baby, I am sure Allah will deal with the perpetrators of this act,” Musa said angrily.
Apart from this nursing mother and her baby, 24 other people, according to official records, lost their lives, most of them women. Shortly after the attack, the scene of the incident further portrayed the devastating nature of the blast. As rescue workers were evacuating the dead and the injured, decapitated human parts were seen scattered all over the premises. Sacks were used in parking the human flesh that littered the scene.
Our correspondent also observed that some human heads were severed from their bodies, while human intestines and brain pieces scattered up to the roof of the Sabon Gari local government secretariat.
While Kaduna state commissioner of police, Shehu Umar Usman, blamed the attack on a male suicide bomber, a witness, Ado Bayero, said nobody can tell exactly whether the bomb was planted at the scene or it was a suicide attack.
However, one survivor, who is now receiving treatment at the Ahmadu Bello University Teaching Hospital (ABUTH), Adamu Hussaini Lere, cleared the controversy.
“I was in a queue for cheque collection, because I successfully passed the screening. I noticed a small boy of about 11 years. The movement of the boy made me suspicious. I therefore moved to call one of the policemen that were supervising the screening exercise. Before I got to the policeman, I felt that I was lifted up from the ground and thrown far away.
“Miraculously I found myself here (ABUTH). It is on this basis that I strongly believe that that boy was the suicide bomber that detonated the bomb. This is because as I moved towards the policeman, I saw when the boy tried to dodge and suddenly the bomb went up,” Lere said.
As at yesterday, the death toll in the Zaria blast stood at 26. The Chief Medical Director of the ABUTH, Professor Lawal Khalid, said one more person that was receiving treatment at the hospital died, bringing the number of dead to 26.
Normalcy has since returned to the ancient city of Zaria. However, different institutions, including worship centres, have beefed up security around their facilities. Our correspondent observed that worshippers were thoroughly searched before being allowed into most Juma’at mosques.
Like the states above, the tales from Cigama village of Birnin Magaji local area of Zamfara State were not less harrowing.
“I was inside the mosque listening to Ramadan Tafsir when I started hearing gunshots; there was commotion as everyone was running to different directions. I then concluded that we were under attack by the armed bandits.” Musa Hamisu told Daily Trust Saturday.
By the time the dust settled last Sunday 38 people were killed by the rampaging gunmen.
The gunmen struck around 5 pm when everyone was preparing for Iftar, while others were listening to the Tafsir in the village central mosque.
Witnesses told Daily Trust Saturday that the bandits had earlier attacked the neighbouring village of Kokeya and killed at least two people.
Farming and herding communities in the state have been witnessing a series of deadly raids by armed bandits in what appears to be a longstanding feud between cattle rustlers and vigilantes.
The bandits were provoked after the vigilantes from Cigama village came to offer help for the residents of neighbouring Kokeya when they were being attacked in a broad day light.
Daily Trust Saturday learnt that the attackers were on a retaliatory mission.
“Dozens of them arrived on motorbikes, horses and even camels and started firing at residents, setting residential houses ablaze,” a witness Isa Shuaibu explained.
A resident, Aliyu Cigama, said the attackers also made away with herds of cattle, goats and sheep.