Jihadists have kidnapped and slaughtered scores of people in an attack during Friday prayers in central Nigeria.
The exact toll of the attacks, which also hit the village of Binzi in Niger State, was unknown, federal representative Jafaru Mohammed said.
Jibril Ahmad, a civilian who survived the attack, said: ‘Soon after finishing the normal Friday prayer, the armed group of Lakuwara, in their hundreds, wielding guns, knives and machetes, began to attack us.’
‘They slaughtered some of our people, saying we are not practising the true teachings of Islam,’ Ahmad added.
Some are understood to have escaped when another jihadist group, known as Mahmuda, started clashing with the militants.
Niger state police said they were aware of the kidnapping, but had not received reports of deaths.
Africa’s most populous country is battling a 17-year insurgency by jihadist groups, who have made such abductions a key tactic – including the 2014 kidnapping of hundreds of schoolgirls in the town of Chibok.
The insurgency is concentrated in the northeast, though Friday’s attack was in the west of the country, an area that has seen increased activity by armed groups and militants from the Sahel as the conflict has splintered.
Jihadists have kidnapped and slaughtered scores of people in an attack during Friday prayers in central Nigeria. File image shows a Nigerian jihadist in 2014
Some of the jihadi militants in Nigeria have presented themselves as an alternative to the government in areas with limited government and security presence.
A key issue in Nigeria is the poor welfare of the country’s overstretched and underpaid security forces, which President Bola Tinubu has sought to address by recently announcing pay rises and mass recruitment for the military.
The latest kidnapping comes just weeks after 163 kidnapped Nigerians were rescued from jihadi captivity.
The freed captives, mostly women and children, were handed over to authorities by security forces in Ilorin, the capital of Kwara State, earlier this month.
The Nigerians were abducted on February 3 when jihadi militants stormed the village of Woro, killing over 160 others.
February’s attack was one of the deadliest in Nigeria in recent years, and showed how militants who had previously focused their activities in the north are moving south through Africa’s most populous nation, where gangs compete for territory and control of natural resources in villages where they outnumber the country’s overstretched security forces.
The US is providing military support to Nigeria under an agreement it says aims to protect Nigerian Christians, though much of that support is restricted to logistics and intelligence-gathering at the heart of the violence in the north.
The victims in the Muslim-majority Woro were rescued this month alongside 145 other victims who had been kidnapped, mostly from the neighbouring Niger State.
Local authorities did not say how the captives were rescued from the dense, expansive forest of the Kainji Lake National Park.
President Tinubu described it as the ‘largest rescue operation ever’ undertaken on a single day, and promised to intensify operations against armed gangs.
You must be logged in to post a comment Login