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Dozens killed in Nigerian school attack
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Suspected Islamic militants killed at least 29 students in a pre-dawn attack yesterday on a northeast Nigerian school, setting ablaze a locked dormitory and shooting and slitting the throats of those who escaped through windows. Some were burned alive, survivors said.
Soldiers guarding a checkpoint near the government school were mysteriously withdrawn hours before the attack, said the spokesman for the governor of Yobe state.
Female students were spared in the attack. The attackers went to the female dormitories and told the young women to go home, get married and abandon the Western education they said is anathema to Islam, survivors and community leaders told Governor Ibrahim Gaidam when he visited the now-deserted and destroyed Federal Government College at Buni Yadi, a secondary school 70 kilometers south of the state capital Damaturu.
The militants locked the door of one dormitory where male students were sleeping and then set it ablaze, slitting the throats of those who tried to clamber out of windows and gunning down those who ran away, said teacher Adamu Garba.
Some students were burned alive in the attack that began around 2am, he said.
He said the entire complex of the relatively new school had been burned out by firebombs — six dormitories, the administrative building, staff quarters, classrooms, a clinic and the kitchen.
“The community complained to the governor that yesterday the military were withdrawn and then the attack happened,” he said.
A group of about eight soldiers used to man the checkpoint, and the nearest military base was a unit of about 30 soldiers in Buni Gari town, 2 kilometers away.
But soldiers from Damaturu did not arrive until noon, hours after the attackers had finished their work and taken off, according to community leaders who said they buried the bodies of 29 victims. Most appeared to be between 15 and 20 years old.
Military spokesman Eli Lazarus said he could not give an exact death toll because soldiers still were gathering corpses.
Nigeria’s military has reported arresting several soldiers accused of aiding and passing information to extremists of the terrorist network of Boko Haram, the nickname means “Western education is forbidden.”
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