At least 100 persons are said to have been killed by suspected Fulani herdsmen in some villages of Kajuru Local Government Area of Kaduna State on Monday 11 March.
Report say over 30 houses were burnt.
The attacks were said to have taken place in the early morning hours between 7.30am – 8.30am.
Daily Independent (a Nigerian national daily) claimed it had a source from Dogo Noma who confirmed the horrifying incident. It reports the attacks centered on the Ikirimi village and Iri, Dogon Noma in Ungwar Gamo in Kajuru.
The source said the attackers carried jerrycans of fuel with cutlasses while some carried guns.
The newspapers quoted its source as saying that some of those who survived the attack “carried some of the corpses and put them on the road for government to see”.
“By the time I left the village 27 people were injured but their could be more because some ran into the bush for safety. But I learnt that the invaders pursued them into the bush. Some of the injured were taking shelter at Mararaba Police Division”, the source said.
Kajuru, like many communities in northern Nigeria, had been the centre of gruesome attacks often between the mostly muslim Fulani herdsmen communities and their usually Christian indigenous host populations.
At the eve of the presidential election in February, Gov. Nasir El-Rufai had claimed that at least 66 Fulani settlers had been killed in Kajuru but some observers could not independently verify the governor’s claims and continued to demand for irrefutable evidence.
El-Rufai, himself a Fulani, may have referred to skirmishes few days earlier in the area in which about a dozen persons mostly Fulani’s were said to have died.
The recent spate of attacks may be in revenge.
The Police Public Relations Officer, Kaduna Command, Yakubu Sabo, said he could only confirm the attack of the previous day Sunday in which he said 16 persons were killed, and promised to report back his findings about the killings on Monday.
He gave the usual assurances that the Command will “uncover the masterminds of this dastardly act and bring them to justice”, then he appealed for calm.
The government of Buhari has been under heavy criticism for the sheer number of loss of human lives under its watch from communal clashes since it came into office in 2015 promising better security.
In Spite of this criticism, the government and its ruling party managed to win re-election for a second term in office in February, yet it has offered no clear blueprint to tackle and end this vicious orgy of killings and deaths in the world’s most populous black country.
