Dozens feared dead in air strike on village in northeastern Nigeria

Amnesty International says more than 100 people killed in military attack on a market in Jilli village.

Dozens of people are feared dead after Nigerian military aircraft struck a village market while pursuing members of the rebel group Boko Haram in the country’s northeast, according to local officials and an international human rights group.

Amnesty International said in a post on social media on Sunday that more than 100 people had been killed and 35 others wounded in the attack the previous day.

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Local chief Lawan Zanna Nur Geidam told the AFP news agency that “the total casualties, dead and injured, is around 200”.

The strike occurred on the Jilli village in Yobe state on the border with Borno state, the heartland of a long-running rebellion that has killed thousands of people and displaced millions more.

Nigeria’s Air Force said in a statement that it had killed Boko Haram fighters in an air strike on the Jilli axis in Borno state. It did not mention hitting a market.

The government of Yobe state later said in a statement that an air strike on the area had been conducted near a market that people were attending.

“Some people from Geidam LGA [local government area] bordering Gubio LGA in Borno state, who went to the Jilli weekly market, were affected,” said Brigadier General Dahiru Abdulsalam, military adviser to the Yobe state government. He gave no further details.

The Yobe State Emergency Management Agency (SEMA) said it had received preliminary reports of an incident at the Jilli market “which reportedly resulted in casualties affecting some marketers” and activated the emergency response.

Zanna Nur said that many of the injured were taken to hospitals in nearby Geidam and Maiduguri.

A worker at the Geidam General hospital, in Yobe, said at least 23 people injured in the incident were receiving treatment, the Associated Press news agency reported.

Amnesty International condemned the strike, saying that “launching air raids is not a legitimate law enforcement method by anyone’s standard. Such reckless use of deadly force is unlawful, outrageous and lays bare the Nigerian military’s shocking disregard for the lives of those it supposedly exists to protect”.

Amnesty called on Nigerian authorities to “immediately and impartially investigate the incident and ensure that suspected perpetrators are held to account”.