The Boko Haram militant group, which the Nigerian government accuses of gunning down dozens of students while they slept yesterday, may be shifting its focus to so-called soft targets, President Goodluck Jonathan said.
As many as 50 students were killed in the early morning attack on the dormitory of the YobeState College of Agriculture in Gujba, a town about 10 kilometers (6 miles) from the state capital of Damaturu, the Associated Press reported, citing the school’s provost, Molima Idi Mato.
“They are looking for soft spots, places where you won’t expect them, just to embarrass the government,” Jonathan said in a chat with journalists aired on state-run television.
A spate of militant assaults led Jonathan to declare a state of emergency in Yobe and two other areas in May to battle the insurgents. The Gujba attack occurred two weeks after authorities ordered schools across Yobe to reopen. They had been shut since a July 6 secondary school attack left about 20 students and a teacher dead.
Boko Haram, whose name means “Western education is a sin” in the Hausa language and aims to overthrow the government to establish an Islamic state, has killed thousands of people since 2009, mostly in attacks across the mainly Muslim north and the capital, Abuja. Nigeria’s more than 160 million people are almost evenly split between Christians, predominant in the south, and Muslims.
Abubakar Yahaya, who rushed to look for his son when he heard about the attack, said by phone that he counted 42 bodies lying inside and outside the dormitory. He said he found another 18 injured students as he searched through wards yesterday at the Damaturu Specialist Hospital.
“The incident is sad, but the security forces are doing everything possible to apprehend the culprits,” Capt. Eli Lazarus, a joint military task force spokesman, said in a statement yesterday.
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