Nigeria militants in deadly village raid near Maiduguri

BBC World News

Militants in Nigeria have attacked a village near the north-eastern city of Maiduguri killing 21 people and injuring 91 others, officials say.

Gunmen armed with rocket-propelled grenades fired from three trucks during the raid on Sunday evening.

Hours later a female suicide bomber killed one person as people queued in the morning by a mosque in the city.

Last week, Nigeria’s leader said the war against Islamist Boko Haram militants had been “technically won”.

• Who are Boko Haram?

President Muhammadu Buhari, who took office in May promising to defeat the group, told the BBC that the militants could no longer mount “conventional attacks” against security forces or population centres.

It had been reduced to fighting with improvised explosives devices (IED), he said.

‘Fired indiscriminately’

A spokesman, Col Mustapha Anka, said that during the attack on Dawari, which is on the outskirts of Maiduguri, the security forces had intervened and killed 10 suicide bombers.

Residents say the militants drove into the village on the back of the trucks and began firing indiscriminately.

Muhammad Kanar, from the National Emergency Management Agency, told the BBC that the injured had been taken to three hospitals in the city for treatment.

A resident in the Ushari Bulabulin district of Maiduguri, who asked not to be named, told the BBC Hausa Service that on Monday morning a woman was standing in a crowd of people waiting to pass through security before entering a mosque.

“People were being scanned before they were allowed to pass, and she went into the middle of the gathering. She killed one person and injured six or seven… We cannot see the lower part of her body – the bomb must have completely destroyed the lower part of her body,” he said.

The military has not commented on the latest attack on the mosque, which is believed to be about a kilometre from the village.

Boko Haram’s six-year insurgency in north-eastern Nigeria has led to the deaths of some 17,000 people, destroyed more than 1,000 schools and displaced more than 1.5 million people.

It has been described as one of the world’s deadliest terror groups.

Only a few days ago, Islamic State, to whom Boko Haram is affiliated, said its West Africa division had launched more than 100 attacks – killing more than 1,000 people – over the past two months, the Site Intelligence Group, with monitors jihadist websites, reported.

Critics of the government argue that it has exaggerated the scale of its success against the militants, and that each time the army claims to have wiped out Boko Haram, the militants have quietly rebuilt.