Nigerian soldiers in manhunt for massacre perpetrators

NIGERIAN soldiers moved house to house yesterday in an urgent bid to hunt down attackers responsible for the massacre of 40 people who were shot or had their throats slit in a student housing area.

The raid early on Tuesday near a university shook the town of Mubi, in Nigeria’s volatile northeast, where Islamist extremist group Boko Haram has carried out scores of attacks previously.

Last week in Mubi, Nigeria’s military conducted a high-profile raid targeting the group, killing a senior Boko Haram figure and arresting 156 suspected members.

Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan called the gruesome offcampus attack “sad and shocking”. Its motives remained unclear, with some officials suggesting the massacre may have been linked to a recent student election.

Mr Jonathan had ordered Nigeria’s security agencies to investigate, his spokesman, Reuben Abati, said.

Police have given an official death toll of 25, saying at least 22 of the victims were students.

A college official, on condition of anonymity, said yesterday that the death toll was at least 40, but he could not immediately say how many were students.

Police spokesman Mohammed Ibrahim said security forces had blanketed Mubi, a commercial hub and university town near the border with Cameroon.

Mr Ibrahim said the attackers knew their victims and called them out by name in a student housing area off the campus of the Federal Polytechnic Mubi, an ethnically mixed school with several thousand students. Victims were shot or had their throats slit.

Residents said it seemed the victims were both Muslim and Christian, but police had not commented. Ethnic and religious divisions regularly lead to unrest in Nigeria.

The town had already been under a 3pm to 6am curfew in the wake of the raid, and this remained in place yesterday.

The suggestion that the killings were linked to the student election raised questions over how and why the dispute would have turned so violent. There were suggestions of ethnic tensions between the mainly Muslim Hausas and predominantly Christian Igbos involved in the vote. A spokesman for the National Emergency Management Agency said some of the victims were candidates in the election.

Boko Haram has continually widened its choice of targets and its attacks have become increasingly sophisticated.

A rights activist and expert on religious violence in northern Nigeria, Shehu Sani, said investigators should concentrate on the role played by the Islamist insurgents. “There is no student rivalry in the history of Nigeria that has ever led to this kind of massacre.”

Nigerian officials have been seeking to show success in the fight against Boko Haram with a number of raids and arrests. There had been a recent lull in major attacks.

On Tuesday the leader of the Boko Haram, Abubakar Shekau, designated a “terrorist” and called the group’s most visible leader by the US State Department in June, said the authorities were holding his spokesman, Abu Qaqa, and vowed to target the families of security forces. Mr Abati has said the state was in talks through “back-room channels” with the militants. Sapa-AFP