Boko Haram Kills 18 In Borno On Friday

Members of the Boko Haram sect killed 18 people and burnt dozens of houses in attacks on two villages in Borno State, witnesses said on Friday, despite a military offensive aimed at stemming violence in vulnerable rural regions.

“Suddenly we heard gunshots in all directions and cries for help from women and children,” said Wovi Pogu, nursing a gunshot wound from the attack on his village of Njaba in which 10 people were killed on Tuesday. Five others were wounded.

“As entered my house I was hit on leg and I fell down but I dragged myself to a nearby shack where I hid until the shooting subsided,” he said, from his bed at a hospital in Borno capital, Maiduguri.

Fighters from Boko Haram, whose campaign for a breakaway Islamic state has killed thousands in mostly Muslim northern Nigeria, also shot dead eight people in Kaya village before razing it to the ground on Wednesday, witnesses told Reuters.

The sect members also torched two other villages on the same day, witnesses said, but no one was hurt.

Col. Muhammadu Dole, spokesman for the military task force in the northeast, said he had no further details on the incidents.