Boko Haram militants launched attacks around a captured town in northeast Nigeria for the second time this week, killing hundreds of people and burning down at least 16 towns and villages, a local government and a union official said.
Since seizing control of the town of Baga on Jan. 3, the Nigerian Islamist militant group carried out another killing spree on Thursday, The Times of India reported. The terror group also managed to scare away soldiers and capture the headquarters of a multinational military force in Baga to combat the insurgency.
"They burnt to the ground all the 16 towns and villages including Baga, Dorn-Baga, Mile 4, Mile 3, Kauyen Kuros and Bunduram," said Musa Bukar, head of the Kukawa local government in Borno state.
On Tuesday evening, the insurgents began burning buildings and shooting indiscriminately on the civilian population, which carried on until the next day, two locals said. At least 100 people were killed when the militants first took over the town on the edge of Lake Chad, the district head Abba Hassan said on Thursday.
"I escaped with my family in the car after seeing how Boko Haram was killing people ... I saw bodies in the street. Children and women, some were crying for help," Mohamed Bukar told Reuters after fleeing to the Borno state capital Maiduguri.
Unconfirmed estimates by victims' relatives placed the death toll from violence in and around Baga on Thursday as high as 2,000, said Bukar.
The dead are "littered on the streets and surrounding bushes," he said, speaking from a camp in the city of Maiduguri that is sheltering people who have fled the attacks.
The attacks were also confirmed by Abubakar Gamandi, head of Borno's fish traders union and a Baga native, Agence France-Presse reported. He claimed hundreds of people are currently trapped on islands of Lake Chad.
For five years, Boko Haram has been attempting to establish an Islamic state in the country's northeast, especially Borno state. In October, Nigerian authorities said they had agreed to a ceasefire with the group, but violence in the north has continued unabated.
The number and scale of attacks increased sharply last year, after the government imposed emergency rule on the three worst-hit states, The Irish Times reported.
"As Muslims, we must all stand and counter this violence that has dented the image of Islam," Nigeria's Islamic leader, the Sultan of Sokoto Muhammad Sa'ad Abubakar, said in the southern town of Auchi. "What is happening to our brothers in the northern parts of the country is bad and we must come together to find an end to this insurgency."
