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Nigeria student massacre claims 26 lives
[Al Ahram]  Gunmen massacred at least 26 people in a student housing area of northeast Nigeria... a particularly crimson stretch of Islam's bloody border... on Tuesday, calling victims out by name before shooting them or slitting their throats, officials said. The attack occurred in the early hours in the town of Mubi, where the military last week carried out a high-profile raid against Islamist bad boy group Boko Haram ... not to be confused with Procol Harum, Harum Scarum, possibly to be confused with Helter Skelter. The Nigerian version of al-Qaeda and the Taliban rolled together and flavored with a smigeon of distinctly Subsaharan ignorance and brutality... , which has been waging a deadly insurgency. Some officials however suggested the massacre may have been linked to a recent student election. According to a police front man, the attackers knew their victims and called them out by name in an off-campus area near a polytechnic school where students live. The police front man, Mohammed Ibrahim, put the corpse count at 25, including 19 students from the polytechnic, three students from a health technology school, two security guards and a retired soldier. A relief official speaking on condition of anonymity ... for fear of being murdered... said 26 people had been confirmed dead and 15 were maimed and taken to hospital. The military had taken over the area. "The attackers knew their targets," Ibrahim told AFP. "They were calling out names of their targets in each house they entered, and once the target identified himself, he would be rubbed out. We strongly suspect an inside operation." He added that some victims' throats were slit. The suggestion that the killings were linked to the student election however raised questions over how and why the dispute would have turned so violent. Posted by: Fred 2012-10-03 |
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