Following the January 2 attacks on Baga town by Boko Haram, body counts across four hospitals in Maiduguri, the Borno State capital have put the number of people killed by the insurgents to over 1,398 so far.
The Daily Post gathered in a visit to the state specialist hospital, the University of Maiduguri Teaching hospital, the Umaru Shehu Ultra Modern hospital and General Muhammadu Shuwa Nursing Home, confirmed that each hospital received not less than 100 corpses from the beginning of this year, with the specialists hospital and UMTH having between 500 and 600 corpses as a result of attacks in close by villages.
Lawan Alhaji Modu, one of the leaders of the people of Gubio local government area of Borno State, said he lost 26 members of his family in the attacks.
On January 19, 2015, Monday, hundreds of people from four villages near the devastated Baga town were also forced to flee after a warning from Boko Haram militants, witnesses and community leaders said, according to AFP.
Abubakar Gamandi, head of the Borno State fishermen’s union, said residents from the affected villages told him Boko Haram fighters had visited “and asked people to leave — or else”.
One women who fled Baga to the Borno State capital, Maiduguri, also confirmed that she joined the crowds fleeing the four villages.
The villages lie some 40 kilometres (25 miles) south of Baga and although there was no confirmation that Boko Haram had moved in, it will likely raise fears that the group plans to push south.
Another woman, Aisa Aribe, who arrived in Maiduguri from Baga on Monday, said Boko Haram were still in control of the town and the streets were strewn with the dead.
“Dead bodies are all over the town and surrounding villages. They are decomposing and there is no one to bury them,” said Aribe.
She said she was among hundreds of women held by the group, initially in a girls’ boarding school and at the home of a local senator.
“They later separated the young women and beautiful ones and took them to a different location,” said added.
“They told the rest of us that we had the choice to either stay or leave and join ‘infidels’ in Monguno ,65 kilometres away where many Baga residents fled.
“They derisively told us we better stay with them because we have nowhere to go since they killed all our husbands.”
Boko Haram began a campaign of terrorism in Nigeria in 2009, attempting to create an Islamic state and to deny Western-style education. Thousands of people have been killed, mostly in northeastern Nigeria since the attacks began.
