Four internally displaced persons, IDPs, in Dalori-1 Camp of Maiduguri, Borno State, have been beheaded by the Boko Haram.
They were reportedly beheaded while hunting outside the camp on Saturday.
The four victims were on Sunday buried by their fellow displaced persons.
Two other IDPs who were among a 12-man hunting troop were yet to be accounted for on Sunday evening.
It took a search team to find the four beheaded bodies some few kilometres from the Dalori camp along the Maiduguri-Bama road.
Sources
familiar with the incident said the attacked IDPs who were also
volunteer members of the local vigilante, Civilian-JTF, often go to the
bush to hunt for games which they either cook to beef up their protein
needs or sell to earn some cash.
It was supposed to be another
normal hunting day for the 12 men on Saturday, but unfortunately, they
ran into a gang of Boko Haram insurgents who attacked and beheaded four
of them.
“Six of the IDP hunters managed to run back late
afternoon of Saturday to inform us at the camp that they were attacked
by Boko Haram fighters”, said an IDP from Bama who identified himself as
Alai Goni.
“When we waited for the six others to return and they
did not, we decided to go in search for them. About 6km away from the
camp, we came to a riverbank and we saw a man watering his horse. The
man simply pointed to us where the corpses of the four slain men were
dumped. We became suspicious of him and we had to arrest him and bring
him to the security personnel at the gate of Dalori-1 camp.
“Unfortunately,
we could not immediately find the decapitated heads of three of them;
we only found three bodies without their heads, while the fought one
whose head was not separated from his body, had some kind of sharp word
forcefully driven into his forehead.”
The source said the heads
of the four beheaded persons were later found early Sunday morning,
after which they were prepared for burial at about 9 a.m.
“Unfortunately, we have not heard from the other two missing IDPs and we are not sure if they are still alive or dead”, he said.
Dalori
camp is about 1.5km from the University of Maiduguri that has been a
target for Boko Haram suicide bombers in the past weeks.
The
leader of the Civilian-JTF, Abba Kalli, who also confirmed the incident,
blamed the victims for embarking on such “dangerous expedition”, after
they had been severally warned that it was dangerous for them to wander
away from the camp.
“It was indeed a sad occurrence for us yesterday,” he said.
“Four
of them were beheaded; two were captured and taken away, while the rest
six managed to escape. We have severally warned them going even 2km
kilometres away from their camps in that axis is very dangerous because
the Boko Haram insurgents were there in the bush. But they refused to
heed to warning, by insisting on going to hunt in the bush”.
“They
have been buried according to the Islamic rite this morning,” said
Kalli who confirmed that the slain victims were all IDPs from Bama who
later volunteered to be members of the Civilian-JTF.
According to sources at the camp that the slain persons were named Wali Fanne, Ibrahim, Chacha, and Baba Karemi.
Residents
living around the camp, have expressed concern over the increasing
attacks around Maiduguri, as they called on the state government and
security operatives to increase surveillance in that part of the Borno
capital that is increasingly becoming porous for Boko Haram attacks.
Neither the police nor the military has issued any statement on the latest incident.
The Boko Haram insurgency has caused about 100,000 deaths since 2009.
No comments:
Post a Comment