Raiders kill 27 students in Nigeria
A TTACKERS shot and stabbed to death 27 students in the second attack near colleges in Nigeria’s troubled north-east in the past few days, authorities said yesterday.
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 10pm on Monday and 3am yesterday.
Twenty-seven students were killed, forcing the school to close yesterday, according to student affairs officer Mohammed Baba Karewa.
Authorities say they speculate that students may have been behind the attacks, but Mubi and the surrounding region have also suffered from a spate of killings by the radical Islamist sect 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 written warning pasted on the gate of the female hostel inside the campus. It was widely believed to have been written by members of Boko Haram.
The message ordered authorities to evacuate the school, he said.
The college attack followed the killing on Saturday of three students outside a university campus, about 170km away, in the city of Maiduguri, Boko Haram’s spiritual home.
Ahmed Mohammed, a spokesman for the University of Maiduguri, said on Monday the university was aware of the attack but that he could not comment as it had occurred off school premises.
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.
Chaos
Those attacks left at least two dead in Mubi, police said, and created communications chaos in a nation that relies on cellphones.
Boko Haram’s deadly campaign has targeted mosques, churches, schools and government security buildings and, more recently, 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.
The group wants the federal government to release its imprisoned members and implement strict sharia (Islamic law) across Nigeria, which is largely divided into a Christian south and a Muslim north. – Sapa-AP