Strapped with a booby-trapped vest and sent by Boko Haram to kill as many people as possible, the young teenage girl tore off the explosives and fled as soon as she was out of sight of her handlers.
Her two companions, however, completed their grisly mission and walked into a crowd of hundreds at Dikwa refugee camp in northeast Nigeria and blew themselves up, killing 58 people.
Later found by local self-defense forces, the girl’s tearful account is one of the first indications that at least some of the child bombers used by Boko Haram are aware that they are about to die and kill others.
“She said she was scared because she knew she would kill people, but she was also frightened of going against the instructions of the men who brought her to the camp,” said Modu Awami, a self-defense fighter who helped question the girl”.
Her story was corroborated when she led soldiers to the unexploded vest, Awami said Thursday by phone from the refugee camp, which holds 50,000 people who have fled Boko Haram’s Islamic uprising.
The girl is in custody and has given officials information about other planned bombings that has helped them increase security at the camp, Satomi Ahmed, chairman of the Borno State Emergency Management Agency, told reporters.
Awami said he had no information about how the girl came to be with Boko Haram. The extremists have kidnapped thousands of people and there are fears they may be turning their captives into weapons.
An army bomb disposal expert has told the AP that some suicide bombs are detonated remotely, so the carriers may not have control over when the bomb goes off.
Even two days later, it’s difficult to say exactly how many people died at Dikwa because there were corpses and body parts everywhere, including in the cooking pots, Awami said.
“Women, children, men and aged persons all died,” he said by telephone. “I cannot say the exact number as some cannot be counted because the bodies were all mangled.”
Source: AP
