Baga death toll rises, 228 killed, 4,000 houses burnt –senator maina

Contrary to reports of death toll of 185 lives and
destruction of over 2,000 houses at Baga, Borno State,
after Boko Haram gunmen and men of the Multinational
Joint Task Force (MJTC) clashed, last week, Senator
Maina Ma’aji Lawan, representing Borno North Senatorial
District, declared that his two-day visit to the border
town revealed 228 fresh graves, 4,000 houses leveled.
Lawan made the “declaration and assessment” of the
Baga carnage, Saturday.
According to him, despite the widely reported carnage
and destruction of Baga, there was much more to the
reports on the total number of people killed and houses
destroyed in the fishing and commercial town.
The reality of the clash on ground, he disclosed, is very
much higher than the 185 lives lost and the destruction
of 2,000 houses, 62 vehicles and 284 motorcycles
reported. Instead, the senator said:
“During my two-day on-the-spot visit to Baga, what I saw
was very frightening and sad to report and comment
further, as many more lives and properties were
destroyed in the two-day carnage. The houses leveled or
torched run for a distance of three-four kilometers of
township settlements.
I drove through the charred remains and counted no
fewer than 4,000 houses of innocent residents destroyed
in the fight between the Boko Haram sect and soldiers of
Multinational Joint Task Force (MJTF).
“The magnitude of the carnage has overwhelmed me, as
the number of and level at which the National
Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), Nigerian Red
Cross (NRC), the JNL, Izala and other humanitarian
agencies in Baga town are carrying out their
humanitarian activities is grossly inadequate to meet the
food, health and housing requirements of victims that
are still sleeping in the open air. Even, NEMA, as at last
Friday, had only two tents to cope with tens of hundreds
of displaced victims.”
.
Speaking on the exact death toll, Lawan said: “I
personally visited all the four grave sites before arriving
at the exact number of residents killed in the destruction
of Baga town.
At the Wayah grave
yard, I counted 130 fresh graves, while at the Arewa
cemetery, 60 people were buried by their relations. The
Magumeri grave yard also gave me a total of 60 fresh
graves. These bring to a total of 228 people massacred
and buried in Baga by their surviving relations last week.
“Inside the town, the community leader furnished me
with a total of eight graves in which some of the victims
killed in the Tuesday and Wednesday clash between the
Boko Haram insurgents and soldiers.”
Women allegedly sacked from their houses by soldiers
stand in front of burnt houses in the remote northeast
town of Baga on April 21, 2013 after two days of clashes
between officers of the Joint Task Force and members of
the Islamist sect Boko Haram on April 19 in the town
near Lake Chad, 200 kms north of Maiduguri, in Borno
State. Photo: AFP.
He called on humanitarian agencies and philanthropists
to act swiftly to “intervene and assist” the surviving tens
of hundreds of Baga victims with food, shelter, medical
services and drugs, and shelter by setting up more
resettlement camps and water points, as against NEMA’s
two tents.