20th February, 2014
No less than 98 corpses have been buried in Bama, after the latest attack by Boko Haram gunmen.
The official death toll given early today was 60.
Gunmen stormed the town in the early hours of Wednesday, firing on a school, shooting or burning to death dozens of people and trashing the palace of a traditional ruler of one of West Africa’s oldest Islamic kingdoms.
The area of the attack was a wasteland of burnt buildings that still smelt faintly of charred flesh, according to a Reuters journalist who toured the scene with local officials.
Women and children could be seen gathering what few possessions they had from the ashen wrecks of their houses, many of them carrying them off on their heads as they trekked out to find somewhere else to shelter.
“We recovered 98 bodies that have already been buried since the attack,” Akura Satomi, a pro-government civilian militia leader responsible for security in the town, told Reuters.
That made 200 killed this week in just two attacks.
On Sunday the Boko Haram gunmen killed 106 people in the village of Izhge, one of their deadliest assaults so far. That prompted the Borno state governor to say the rebels were better armed and motivated than government forces, a charge the military denied.