Fourty farmers have been reportedly killed after Boko Haram/Islamic State of West African Province (ISWAP) terrorists invaded Dumba, a farming settlement in Kukawa local government area of Borno State.
Leadership reports that residents of the area say the terrorists stormed the area at about 3pm on Sunday afternoon, January 12, with sophisticated weapons and rounded them up.
One of the farmers who escaped unhurt said the terrorists, before embarking on a shooting spree, told them that farming activities, which according to them were banned, had not been lifted in the area, hence the terrorists said that anyone found farming there henceforth would be killed.
“We are the people farming at Dumba. Today (Sunday), the terrorists came and met us in the area. They chased us out of the farm and said that they had not lifted the ban on farming in the area. They said any farmer found in the area henceforth would be k!lled.
They k!lled many of our farmers. It was in the night that we ran to soldiers and Civilian Joint Taskforce (CJTF) members who assisted in taking us to a safer place.
We were farming together with those killed, God saved me. The dead bodies that I counted were about 40 of them. The rest that were shot in the bush and those that escaped with gunshot wounds could not be accounted for,” he narrated.
Also, craving anonymity, a member of the CJTF, who participated in rescuing the survivors, said such attacks on the farmers by the terrorists have been a recurring issue, adding that at times the terrorists would kill up to 10 of the farmers, and that such killings usually go unreported, but that the alarming rate of the present killings pushed them to voice out the challenges the farmers and fishermen were going through in the Kukawa local government area of the State.
“It was around 3pm that the attack occured, and it was around 5pm that the survivors reached us. We used boat to ferry them to a safer place together with the help from the military. About 200 of them that escaped were rescued. They told us that over 40 of them were killed. They are mostly fishermen and crop farmers,” said the CJTF member.
Dumba community is about 7km to the popular Baga fishing community where a large scale of fishing takes place due to the riverine nature of the local government area which borders Republic of Chad.
