Sporadic violence still threatens Nigerian city

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria — Banks and markets reopened in this northern Nigerian city after five days of fierce fighting between police and a radical Islamist sect.

The city was largely quiet Saturday — the streets of Maiduguri, the Borno state capital, had been cleared of bodies and the blood spilled during gunbattles that left at least 300 people dead. But sporadic violence continued.

In the parking lot of the Umaru Shehu hospital, Associated Press reporters saw the body of a young man with his hands tied behind his back, dead from a bullet through the back of his head.

A hospital official, who asked to remain anonymous because he feared more violence, said five other people had been killed Saturday, their bodies left in the parking lot. He said 172 bodies had been brought to the hospital since Tuesday.

Destruction was evident Saturday only in some areas of the city: The police building was in ruins and smoke rose from the destroyed compound of the sect’s leader. The compound was guarded by soldiers with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades.

A bloodied man, alleged to be a member of the sect, lay beneath a tree near the compound, his hands tied behind his back, guarded by the soldiers.

Borno Police Commissioner Christopher Dega said the members of the Boko Haram sect are likely in hiding and may be using the current calm to regroup.

“I am warning all of you to report immediately if such members are fighting,” Dega told reporters late Friday.

Associated Press reporters saw two men heavily sweating Saturday as they were being questioned by soldiers outside the compound. They were later released.

One of the men, 35-year-old Ibrahim Mohammed, told the AP that he and his family cowered in their house for days, terrorized by knife and sword-wielding sect members, and later by soldiers, who, he said, would shoot anything that moved.

“It was terrible,” Mohammed said as he drew an imaginary knife across his throat. “At first if you run, (the sect) will knife you, and then after you run, (soldiers) will shoot you.”

He said he hid 17 Christian neighbors, including a pregnant woman, in his compound during the fighting.

In a wave of violence that began Sunday, July 26, in Bauchi and quickly spread to three other northern states, including Borno, the sect, Boko Haram — which means “Western education is sacrilege” — attacked police stations, churches and government buildings. The group is seeking the imposition of strict Islamic Shariah law in Nigeria, a country of several religions.

On Wednesday, troops retaliated, killing about 100 people, half of them inside the sect’s mosque. The bodies of barefoot young men littered the streets of Maiduguri on Thursday morning as security forces hunted militants.

Dega said a mass burial will be held for the victims, but did not say when. No official death toll has been released; officials are still counting the bodies.

An Associated Press reporter saw dead bodies piled into at least six trucks in the hospital’s parking lot on Wednesday.

Mohammed Yusuf, head of the Boko Haram sect, was killed Thursday after he was found hiding in a goat pen at his in-laws’ home. The details of his death remain murky.

Nigeria’s Civil Rights Congress, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International called for investigations into Yusuf’s death and other killings during the upheaval in predominantly Muslim northern Nigeria.

(This version CORRECTS graf 10, attack Sunday in Bauchi not Borno.)