Dozens brutally killed in Nigerian school attack

DAMATURU, Nigeria — Suspected Islamic extremists have killed at least 29 students at a school dormitory attack, the spokesman for the governor of Nigeria’s Yobe state told The Associated Press.

Soldiers guarding a checkpoint near the government school were mysteriously withdrawn hours before the attack, said the spokesman Abdullahi Bego.

The militants locked the door of a dormitory where male students were sleeping and then set it ablaze, slitting the throats of those who tried to clamber out of windows and gunning down those who ran away, said teacher Adamu Garba.

He said some students were burned alive in the attack that began around 2 a.m on Tuesday.

Female students were spared in the attack, said spokesman Bego. The attackers went to the females’ dormitories and told the young women to go home and get married and to abandon the Western education they said is anathema to Islam, he said.

They allowed the females to escape, Bego told AP, relating what survivors and community leaders told Gov. Ibrahim Gaidam when he visited the now-deserted and destroyed Federal Government College at Buni Yadi, a secondary school 45 miles south of state capital Damaturu.

Bego said the entire complex of the relatively new school had been burned out by firebombs — six dormitories, the administrative building, staff quarters, classrooms, a clinic and the kitchen. He said Gaidam would be asking questions about why the school apparently was left unprotected.

“The community complained to the governor that yesterday the military were withdrawn and then the attack happened,” he said. A group of about eight soldiers manned the checkpoint when an AP reporter visited recently, and the nearest military base was a unit of about 30 soldiers in Buni Gari town, 1.2 miles away.

But soldiers from Damaturu did not arrive until noon, hours after the attackers had finished their work and taken off, according to community leaders who said they buried the bodies of 29 victims. Most appeared to be between 15 and 20 years old, Bego said.

Military spokesman Eli Lazarus had confirmed the attack but said he could not give an exact death toll because soldiers still were gathering corpses. He could not immediately be reached to comment on charges about the abandoned roadblock.

Nigeria’s military has reported arresting several soldiers accused of aiding and passing information to extremists of the terrorist network of Boko Haram — the nickname means “Western education is forbidden.” A senator also has been accused of similar charges.

President Goodluck Jonathan on Monday night dismissed charges the military is losing the war to halt the 4-year-old Islamic uprising in the northeast of Africa’s biggest oil producer.