Following this morning’s school shooting in Kumba, South-West Cameroon, Doctors Without Borders launched a mass casualty plan.
According to a press statement, the group responded with ambulance service and surgical care in the Presbyterian General Hospital (PGH), Kumba.
Doctors Without Borders received a total of ten patients between the ages of 10 and 15. Of these patients, five were referred to other hospitals for specialist treatment through our ambulance service; four continue to receive treatment in PGH; and tragically, one patient was pronounced dead on arrival.
“As a medical humanitarian organisation we lament the tragic loss of life in the Kumba community. This attack, which saw children gunned down while attending school, was a reprehensible and indecent act. Civilian structures including schools and hospitals must not be targets, ” said Alberto Jodra Marcos, Emergency Coordinator for Doctors Without Borders in South-West Cameroon.
It would be recalled that Gunmen stormed the Mother Francisca College in Kumba in southwestern Cameroon on Saturday, killing at least eight schoolchildren and wounding eight more.
One parent who was just outside the school at the time of the attack said the gunmen arrived on motorbikes and in civilian clothes in the middle of the day before shooting the children indiscriminately.
It was not clear if the attack was linked to the ongoing struggle between the army and groups attempting to form a breakaway state called Ambazonia in the English-speaking west.
A local witness in the area said Ambazonian fighters were responsible for the bloodshed.
“Ambazonian fighters arrived [at] the school… started shooting into the classes. They say the students are traitors for attending classes when they have called for an effective school boycott in the Northwest and Southwest regions… we ran into the house for safety. It was so terrifying,” he said on condition of anonymity.