An eyewitness, Usman Ismail who narrowly escaped being slaughtered like goat by Boko Haram on Saturday, November 28, 2020 in rice farm in Borno State, Nigeria narrated how he managed to escape and how his colleagues were slaughtered.
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He said the assailants surrounded them as they were working in their farms in Garin-Kwashebe village.
“Some of them walked up to us and asked that we follow them to a far end of the rice field,” he said.
“We were scared because we knew they were Boko Haram who usually come to harass us for money and food. But as we got to the edge of the field, we spotted one man at a distance slitting the throat of someone. We panicked and began to run. I was lucky to escape but others could not.”
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Hamidu Bala, another resident of Zabarmari, who is also a member of Rapid Response Squad, a Borno government-established task force against banditry, gave an insight into how the 43 farmers were killed.
He said on Friday, a group of farmers were able to disarm a lone Boko Haram member, who they handed over to the local security operatives.
“That action was what may have prompted reprisal from the insurgents,” he said.
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“Saturday was election day and many of the security operatives working around the rice farms were around the polling areas and no one was expected to be in the fields harvesting rice,” he said.
“According to one of the farmers who miraculously escaped being slaughtered, the insurgents arrested them and took them to a house at the outskirts of Garin-Kwashebe. After some hours, the insurgents began to pick them out one by one, with the pretext to interrogate if they had a hand in the arrest of their colleague.
Boko Haram has killed some Nigerian citizens
Boko Haram used to illustrate the story.
“Unknown to them, each person that was taken out of the house was summarily slaughtered like an animal. It took some time before some of them managed to sense that their colleagues were being killed.”
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He said over 60 farmers were taken into the said house, “but we are yet account for the rest of them. We don’t know what happened to them; we don’t know if they had changed the location because we could only recover 43 corpses, while the remaining ones are yet to be accounted for.”
Zabarmari, a farming community located about 25km from Maiduguri, is the heartland of rice production in Borno State. Most of the residents of the area are Hausa migrants from North-west Nigeria.
The community had suffered similar attacks, both in the township and in the rice fields, in the past.
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Borno State Governor, Prof. Babagana Zulum led families, friends and sympathisers in tears for the burial of the 43 farmers yesterday, Sunday, November 30, 2020.
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