Suspected Boko Haram militants have killed nearly 150 people in north-eastern Nigerian villages, mowing down men and children while they prayed in mosques and shooting women preparing food at home, witnesses said on Thursday.
Dozens of militants stormed three remote villages in the flashpoint Borno state on Wednesday evening, setting houses ablaze in the bloodiest day of attacks by the extremist group since President Muhammadu Buhari came to power in May.
Thursday afternoon, Two suicide bomb blasts along a highway in northeast Nigeria killed at least 10 people, state police said, the latest in a string of almost daily attacks by suspected Islamist militants.
A female suicide bomber killed seven and injured 13 at a village called Malari on the main road from Bama to Konduga while a second suicide bomber killed three in blast along the same road, Borno state police chief Aderemi Opadokun said.
A military source said in both cases the suicide bombers targeted crowded areas where locals sell fruit along the highway, which runs southeast of the state capital Maiduguri.
Thousands of people have been killed and about 1.5 million displaced during Boko Haram’s six-year fight to create an Islamic caliphate in the northeast of Africa’s top oil producer.
The militants have since mostly resorted to deadly hit-and-run attacks on remote villages and the use of suicide bombers.
Opadokun also confirmed Boko Haram attacked the town of Kukawa not far from Lake Chad on Wednesday evening. He said the attackers killed “many” and burned down houses.
The state police chief did not give a death toll from the attack. He said at least eight injured residents from Kakuawa had been treated at a Maiduguri hospital.
