Suspected Nigerian Islamist militants killed 17 people in a remote northeastern village on Tuesday night, hours after a bomb killed 118 people in the central city of Jos, police said on Wednesday, according to the Associated Press.
Militants opened fire on Alagarno village and burned several houses to the ground, the AP reported.
During the latest attack on three northeastern villages, residents said they hid in the bush and watched while Boko Haram fighters set their thatched-roof mud homes ablaze, according to the AP.
"We saw our village go up in flames as we hid in the bush waiting for the dawn. We lost everything," Apagu Maidaga of the village of Alagarno told the AP, the AP reported.
The attack was barely 20 miles from Chibok, the location where Boko Haram Islamists abducted more than 200 schoolgirls last month, according to the AP.
Police also said men on motorbikes had killed nine people in a raid on the nearby village of Shawa on Monday, the AP reported.
Though there was no immediate claim of responsibility for either assault, Boko Haram has either claimed or been blamed for scores of similar attacks in that part of Borno state, near the hilly border with Cameroon, according to the AP.
The group has heightened their violent behavior in the past two months in its five-year-old violent campaign to carve an Islamic state out of religiously-mixed Nigeria, the AP reported.
Bomb attacks are growing more frequent and sophisticated, including two on the capital last month, and massacres of helpless villagers are an almost daily occurrence, according to the AP.
If the attack in Jos was Boko Haram it shows the group is spreading outwards from the northeast, even though it was not the first attack in Jos, the AP reported.
