Boko Haram Attacks School in Nigeria, Killing Dozens of Male Students

After herding the female students into a classroom, Islamist militants from the group Boko Haram fatally burned or shot dozens of male students in an attack late Monday on a state college in northeastern Nigeria, officials said on Tuesday. It was the fourth school assault attributed to the group in less than a year.

The assailants, who have vilified public education as blasphemous, then burned down dormitories and other buildings and shot at anyone trying to escape. None of the women were reported to have been harmed.

Abdulla Bego, a spokesman for the governor of Yobe State, where the attacks took place, said the killers had traveled in nine pickup trucks to the attack site, the Federal Government College Buni Yadi, about 45 miles from the state capital, Damaturu. They staged the ambush when soldiers in a military garrison assigned to protect the school were absent.

At least 29 students, ages 16 to 18, died in what looked to be part of a widening campaign by the group. More than 200 people have been fatally shot in the region’s remote villages and towns in the last four weeks in what officials have called a spree of apparently random massacres by members of Boko Haram.

The violence has put the government of President Goodluck Jonathan on the defensive and left the army in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, struggling for a strategy after years of failed counterinsurgency efforts.

The assailants seemed to enjoy unfettered access to the college campus chosen for the latest assault, which stirred outrage among residents in the area. In September, 40 students were killed in a similar assault at a nearby state school.

Boko Haram deliberately targets state educational institutions as part of its Islamist, antisecular campaign.

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SOURCE: ADAM NOSSITER 
The New York Times