Residents of Woro village in Nigeria’s Kwara state are still burying their victims three days after suspected jihadist fighters killed 170 people in a massacre that began with a deceptive call to prayer.
“When they said they came to preach, people believed they came to preach; that’s why they caused so many injuries and killed so many people,” MuhammedAbdulkareem told Reuters.“When the shooting started, people said that this was no longer preaching, that it was not normal, and they began to run away to hide.”
The attackers systematically attacked men while kidnapping women and girls, according to survivors.
“They kill anyone they see; they only don’t touch women, but if you are a man, no matter how small you are, they kill you,” declared another resident.They took our women to the mountain, but they killed all the men they saw, and burned all the tents;The chief’s house was reduced to ashes.
The men wrapped the bodies in white cloth and loaded them onto trucks to bury them.Smoke was still coming from the burning building.The local office of the Nigerian Security and Civil Defense Corps remained closed.
“Anyone they saw they killed, only the women they did not touch, but if you were a man, no matter how small you were, they killed you, but they did not kill the women, they took our women to the mountains, but all the men they saw they killed, and they burned all the shops, the chief’s house was reduced to ashes,” declared Muhammed Abdulkareem.
Umaru Abdullahi said the burials are not over yet.”They killed more than two hundred people; tomorrow we will continue packing the bodies to bury them,” he said.
President Bola Tinubu has deployed an army battalion to the Kaiama district following the attack, the deadliest this year in Kwara state, which borders Niger and has seen jihadist groups advance south.
The United States Government condemned this Friday the “terrible attack” carried out on Tuesday in the Nigerian communities of Woro and Nulu, in the state of Kwara (central-west), which caused at least 175 deaths, according to local leaders.
“The United States condemns the terrible attack in Kwara state,” reads a statement from the US Embassy in Nigeria, published on its social network account
The diplomatic mission expressed its “most sincere condolences” to the families of those affected, and showed its support for the deployment of a battalion of the Nigerian Army in Kwara to protect the communities in the area, as well as to bring the perpetrators of this “atrocity” to justice.
The Nigerian Government, which attributed the attack to the jihadist group Boko Haram, has not provided official figures of victims, while the governor of Kwara, Abdulrahman Abdulrazaq, spoke of “at least 75”, a number much lower than the 175 deaths confirmed to EFE by a community leader from Woro.
(With information from Reuters)
