Boko Haram militants have killed at least 11 people, including three aid workers, in an attack on a military base near a camp for displaced people in the northeastern state of Borno in Nigeria, according to the United Nations migration agency.
The raid Thursday night in the town of Rann, near the border with Cameroon, was the latest high-profile attack by militants in Nigeria’s northeast, and it comes less than two weeks after the abduction of 110 girls from a school in the town of Dapchi in neighboring Yobe State.
The United Nations agency, the International Organization for Migration, said the attack had been carried out by militants using automatic weapons, rocket-propelled grenades and gun trucks. The three aid workers who were killed were all Nigerian, the agency said.
Four soldiers and four police officers were also killed in the attack, the agency said, with three other humanitarian workers wounded.
Last year, a Nigerian fighter jet, searching for Boko Haram members, accidentally bombed the camp for displaced people in Rann, killing up to 170 people.
At the time, a Western diplomat said that the Nigerian military had been informed that fighters were amassing to attack a military post nearby but that the strike had hit the camp in error.
The attack in Rann was a further setback for President Muhammadu Buhari, who took office in May 2015 vowing to improve security and who has repeatedly said that the Boko Haram insurgency has been defeated. The government said on Friday that its search for the girls taken in Dapchi, about 250 miles west of Rann, had been extended to neighboring countries.
The Boko Haram insurgency has been centered in Borno, where militants have used violent means to pursue the imposition of a strict interpretation of Islam. More than 20,000 people have been killed and two million forced to leave their homes since 2009.
Two of the aid workers who died in Rann were contractors with the International Organization for Migration and were working as coordinators at the camp for 55,000 displaced people, the United Nations said. The third was a doctor employed as a consultant for Unicef.
“We call on authorities to ensure the perpetrators are brought to justice and account,” Edward Kallon, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator in Nigeria, said in a statement.
Attacks on aid workers are rare, but not unheard-of. In December, four people were killed when a World Food Program convoy was ambushed in Borno.
Boko Haram held a large swath of territory in northeast Nigeria in late 2014. It was pushed out of most of that land by the Nigerian Army, backed by troops from neighboring countries, in early 2015.
Although it has failed to control large areas of land since then, Boko Haram continues to carry out suicide bombings and gun raids in northeast Nigeria, as well as in Cameroon, Chad and Niger.
Reuters
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