Scores killed in Nigeria violence

ABUJA. Fighting between Nigeria’s military and the armed group Boko Haram has left at least 185 people dead in a fishing community in Borno state in country’s northeast, officials said on Sunday.The fighting in Baga, which began on Friday, lasted for hours, sending people fleeing into the arid scrublands surrounding the community on Lake Chad, according to the AP news agency.By Sunday, when government officials finally felt safe enough to see the destruction, homes, businesses and vehicles were burned throughout the area.However, the Borno state military spokesman contested the casualty figures saying “there could have been some casualties, but it is unthinkable to say that 185 people died”.Lieutenant Colonel Sagir Musa told AFP news agency that media reports that about 180 people could have died in the clashes were “extensively inflated”.The assault marks a significant escalation in a long-running insurgency in the predominantly Muslim north, where Boko Haram has mounted a co-ordinated assault on soldiers using military-grade weaponry.Boko Haram, which means “Western education is forbidden” in the Hausa language of Nigeria’s north, has said it wanted its imprisoned members freed and Nigeria to adopt strict Islamic law.Authorities had found and buried at least 185 bodies as of Sunday afternoon, said Lawan Kole, a local government official in Baga. Officials could not offer a breakdown of civilian casualties versus those of soldiers and fighters.Many of the bodies had been burned beyond recognition in fires that razed whole sections of the town, residents said.Brigadier General Austin Edokpaye said the Boko Haram fighters used heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades in the assault, which began after soldiers surrounded a mosque they believed housed members of the group.Edokpaye said they used civilians as human shields during the fighting, implying that soldiers opened fire in neighbourhoods where they knew civilians lived.“When we reinforced and returned to the scene the terrorists came out with heavy firepower, including [rocket-propelled grenades], which usually has a conflagration effect,” the general said.However, local residents who spoke to a journalist who accompanied the state officials said soldiers purposefully set the fires during the attack.Violence by security forces in the northeast targeting civilians has been widely documented by journalists and human rights activists.A similar raid in Maiduguri, Borno state’s capital, in October saw soldiers kill at least 30 civilians and set fires across a neighborhood.