The gunmen, thought to be members of
rebel sect Boko Haram, attacked one hostel, took some students outside
before killing them and shot others trying to flee, people at the scene
told Reuters.
“They started gathering students into
groups outside, then they opened fire and killed one group and then
moved onto the next group and killed them. It was so terrible,” said one
surviving student Idris, who would only give his first name.
“They came with guns around 1 a.m.
(2400 GMT) and went directly to the male hostel and opened fire on them …
The college is in the bush so the other students were running around
helplessly as guns went off and some of them were shot down,” said Ahmed
Gujunba, a taxi driver who lives by the college.
Boko Haram, which wants to establish an
Islamic state in northern Nigeria, has intensified attacks on civilians
in recent weeks in revenge for a military offensive against its
insurgency.
Several schools, seen as the focus of Western-style education and culture, have been targeted.
Boko Haram and spin-off Islamist groups
like the al Qaeda-linked Ansaru have become the biggest security threat
in Africa’s second largest economy and top oil exporter.
Western governments are increasingly
worried about the threat posed by Islamist groups across Africa, from
Mali and Algeria in the Sahara, to Kenya in the east, where Somalia’s
al-Shabaab fighters killed at least 67 people in an attack on a Nairobi
shopping mall a week ago.
Bodies were recovered from dormitories,
classrooms and outside in the undergrowth on Sunday, a member of staff
at the college told Reuters, asking not to be named.
A Reuters witness counted 40 bloody
corpses piled on the floor at the main hospital in Yobe state capital
Damaturu on Sunday, mostly of young men believed to be students.
The bodies were brought from the
college, which is in Gujba, a rural area 30 miles (50km) south of
Damaturu and around 130 miles from Nigerian borders with Cameroon and
Niger.
State police commissioner Sanusi Rufai said he suspected Boko Haram was behind the attack but gave no details.
REVENGE ATTACKS
Thousands have been killed since Boko
Haram launched its uprising in 2009, turning itself from a clerical
movement opposed to Western culture into an armed militia with growing
links to al Qaeda’s West African wing.
President Goodluck Jonathan declared a
state of emergency in three northeastern state in May, including Yobe,
and ordered a military offensive to crush Boko Haram’s insurgency.
There was an initial lull in the
violence as Islamists fled bases in cities, forests and mountains. Then
the militants began revenge attacks on schools, security forces and
civilians believed to be helping them.
In July, suspected Boko Haram
militants killed 27 students and a teacher at a school in Potiskum, a
town about 30 miles from the site of Sunday’s attack.
Several hundred people have died in
assaults over the past few weeks. Some observers say the army offensive
has only succeeded in pushing attacks away from well-guarded large towns
and cities into vulnerable rural areas.
Boko Haram’s insurgency is also
putting pressure on the economy of Africa’s most populous nation.
Nigeria’s security spending has risen to more than 1 trillion naira
($6.26 billion) per year, or around 20 percent of the federal budget.
($1 = 159.8 Nigerian naira)