Eight children were among thirteen civilians who died on Friday when a woman suicide bomber blew herself up in an insurgent attack on a village in northern Cameroon, a traditional chief and a police officer told the media.
The Far North region of Cameroon is currently battling with deadly incursions from neighbouring Nigeria, where an insurgency launched by the terrorist group Boko Haram in 2009 has killed tens of thousands of people.
Mahamat Chetima Abba, the traditional chief, in the village of Mozogo, said the attackers who arrived in the middle of the night brandishing machetes, were shouting “Allah Akbar” (“God is greater”).
He said it was as the panicked villagers tried to run off into the nearby forest, and in the stampede, that a woman suicide bomber detonated her device.
The traditional chief’s account was confirmed by a member of the local defence committee, who said his group had tried to repel the attack.
“Thirteen civilians died, two of them children aged four and five as well as six teenagers,” a regional police officer who chose to remain anonymous, told AFP by phone.
The traditional leader confirmed the number, saying that a woman and her three children were also killed in the attack. Both accounts attributed the attack to Boko Haram.
The anonymous police source said added to the suicide bomber, a man was killed by the self-defence force.
“They infiltrated the population — Boko Haram is inflicting more and more damage here,” Chetima Abba said. “However, it seems that they no longer have the means to carry out mass attacks using guns,” he said, noting that the assailants had carried machetes. “They are using home-made bombs more and more.”
Three members of a self-defence force in the nearby village of Kaliari were killed on Monday.
Over 36,000 people have been killed so far, mostly in Nigeria, and approximately three million people have fled their homes since Boko Haram launched its insurrection in north-eastern Nigeria in 2009.