Attacks kill 27 at Nigerian college
MAIDUGURI, NIGERIA— Assailants shot and stabbed to death 27 students in the second attack near colleges in Nigeria’s troubled northeast in the past few days, authorities said Tuesday.
Danjuma Aiso, a student at Federal Polytechnic Mubi, a college in the town of Mubi in Adamawa state, said attackers invaded the student accommodation outside the campus between 10 p.m. Monday and 3 a.m. Tuesday. Twenty-seven students were killed, forcing the school to close Tuesday, according to student affairs officer Mohammed Baba Karewa.
Authorities speculate that students may have been behind the attacks, but Mubi and the surrounding region have also suffered from a spate of killings by a radical Islamist sect known as Boko Haram.
“The crisis in Mubi is suspected to have been fuelled by campus politics after an election at the (college),” said Yushau Shuaib, the spokesman for the National Emergency Management Agency. Across colleges and universities in Nigeria, some fraternities have turned to gang violence to wield power on campuses.
However, Aiso said students had recently found a warning, pasted on the gate of the female hostel inside the campus, which is widely believed to have been written by members of the Boko Haram sect. The message ordered authorities to evacuate the school, he said.
The college attack follows the killing Saturday of three students outside a university campus, about 170 km away, in the city of Maiduguri, Boko Haram’s spiritual home.
Boko Haram has launched frequent attacks in Maiduguri and, to a lesser degree, in Mubi.
The extremist sect claimed responsibility last month for the destruction of more than 30 phone towers across Nigeria’s north, including Maiduguri and Mubi. Those attacks left at least two dead in Mubi, police said, and created communications chaos in a nation that relies on mobile phones.
Boko Haram’s deadly campaign has targeted mosques, churches, schools and government, security buildings and, more recently, multi-million-dollar telecommunications infrastructure, but targeting students and killing them so brutally is new. Boko Haram’s name means “Western education is sacrilege” in Hausa and the group has been blamed for killing more than 690 people this year alone.