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Lagos, Nigeria: Islamist militants killed dozens of students in a pre-dawn attack on Tuesday on a north-east Nigerian college, survivors said, setting ablaze a locked hostel and shooting and slitting the throats of those who escaped through windows. Some were burned alive.
Adamu Garba said he and other teachers who ran away through the bush estimate 40 students died in the assault that began about 2am on Tuesday at the college at Buni Yadi, a government co-ed school about 70 kilometres south of Damaturu, the capital of Yobe state.
Soldiers were still gathering corpses so he could not give an exact number of dead, military spokesman Captain Eli Lazarus said.
Mr Garba said the attackers first set fire to the college administrative block, then moved to the hostels, where they locked students in and started firebombing the buildings.
At one hostel, he said, "students were trying to climb out of the windows and they were slaughtered like sheep by the terrorists who slit their throats. Others who ran were gunned down." Students who could not escape were burned alive.
Female students were herded into a classroom and were not hurt. The attackers told the women to read the Koran, go home and find husbands, Yobe state police commissioner Sanusi Rufai said. They then set about killing the male students, burning alive at least eight.
The militant group Boko Haram deliberately targets state educational institutions as part of its Islamist, anti-secular campaign. It was the fourth school assault attributed to the group in less than a year.
The violence has put the government of President Goodluck Jonathan on the defensive and left the army in Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, struggling for a strategy after years of failed counterinsurgency efforts.
Much of the Buni Yadi campus was destroyed. "It was a very terrible and gory scene," said Abdulla Bego, a spokesman for the governor of Yobe state, who visited the site on Tuesday afternoon. "When you have a school of that scale burned down completely, it is a very horrible sight. Some patches were still on fire. It was really a very gory scene. We were all outraged."
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Adamu Garba said he and other teachers who ran away through the bush estimate 40 students died in the assault that began about 2am on Tuesday at the college at Buni Yadi, a government co-ed school about 70 kilometres south of Damaturu, the capital of Yobe state.
Soldiers were still gathering corpses so he could not give an exact number of dead, military spokesman Captain Eli Lazarus said.
Mr Garba said the attackers first set fire to the college administrative block, then moved to the hostels, where they locked students in and started firebombing the buildings.
At one hostel, he said, "students were trying to climb out of the windows and they were slaughtered like sheep by the terrorists who slit their throats. Others who ran were gunned down." Students who could not escape were burned alive.
Female students were herded into a classroom and were not hurt. The attackers told the women to read the Koran, go home and find husbands, Yobe state police commissioner Sanusi Rufai said. They then set about killing the male students, burning alive at least eight.
The militant group Boko Haram deliberately targets state educational institutions as part of its Islamist, anti-secular campaign. It was the fourth school assault attributed to the group in less than a year.
The violence has put the government of President Goodluck Jonathan on the defensive and left the army in Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, struggling for a strategy after years of failed counterinsurgency efforts.
Much of the Buni Yadi campus was destroyed. "It was a very terrible and gory scene," said Abdulla Bego, a spokesman for the governor of Yobe state, who visited the site on Tuesday afternoon. "When you have a school of that scale burned down completely, it is a very horrible sight. Some patches were still on fire. It was really a very gory scene. We were all outraged."
More at Link
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