Boko Haram fighters from Nigeria on Sunday kidnapped at least 60
people in a new attack in northern Cameroon in which some people were
killed, police said.
The Islamist militants “burst into two
villages in the Tourou area… They torched houses and left with around 60
people. Most of them were women and children,” a police officer told
AFP.
He said the cross-border attack had “left some people dead”
without giving an exact toll, adding that the Cameroon army had
“launched an operation” in the wake of the assault.
The kidnapping
was the biggest in Cameroon by the Islamists who have staged a series
of attacks in the country in recent months and escalated their bloody
insurgency in their stronghold in northeastern Nigeria.
The assault was launched after neighbouring Chad deployed troops to combat Boko Haram both in Cameroon and Nigeria.
In
Nigeria the Chadian troops are seeking to recapture the strategic city
of Baga, on the shores of Lake Chad, which straddles the borders of
Chad, Nigeria, Niger and Cameroon and which fell to the Islamists early
this month.
Many say the assault on Baga could be Boko Haram’s
deadliest. Satellite pictures released by Amnesty and Human Rights Watch
showed widespread destruction with around 3,700 buildings in Baga and
nearby Doron Baga damaged or destroyed.
Amnesty says as many as
2,000 civilians may have been massacred, but Nigeria’s army objected to
the “sensational” claims and said that the death toll in Baga was about
150.
Some 400 Chadian army vehicles arrived in the Cameroonian
border town of Kousseri on Saturday, and Chadian President Idriss Deby
said they were “operational” as of Sunday.
Boko Haram last Monday
launched an offensive against a Cameroonian military base in Kolofata,
also in the far north of the country, in which 143 “terrorists” and one
Cameroonian soldier were killed, according to Cameroon.
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