Bodies lie in the bushes near small towns in Nigeria after a Boko Haram massacre Jan. 3 killed as many as 2,000 people, and government officials said it is still unsafe to approach the area to retrieve the remains.
Boko Haram still controls the town of Baga and neighboring areas where the
attack occurred, officials told CNN.
BBC’s Radio 1 reported that it is difficult to get an accurate tally of how many were killed in the massacre because counting the bodies and access to the dead has been challenging.
Amnesty International put the tally at around 2,000.
"The attack on Baga and surrounding towns, looks as if it could be Boko Haram’s deadliest act in a catalogue of increasingly heinous attacks carried out by the group. If reports that the town was largely razed to the ground and that hundreds or even as many as two thousand civilians were killed are true, this marks a disturbing and bloody escalation of Boko Haram’s ongoing onslaught against the civilian population," Daniel Eyre, Nigeria researcher for Amnesty International, said on the organization’s website.
Other attacks continued in Nigeria, with 20 dead after a young girl with a bomb strapped to her body detonated it in a marketplace Saturday, CNN said.
On BBC, media analyst Ethan Zuckerman looked at the fact that the 12 Charlie Hebdo deaths in Paris got overwhelming media attention, while the Boko Haram massacre got little. He said Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan expressed sympathy for France but didn’t refer to Baga.
BBC listed numerous attacks throughout the last year perpetrated by Boko Haram, including the kidnapping of 200 schoolgirls who have never been recovered. The one attack on Jan. 3 equaled the number of dead in Nigeria for all of 2014, about 2,000, the site said.
Al Jazeera reported Monday that Boko Haram terrorists had also attacked a military base in the bordering state of Cameroon. A government official there said 200 to 300 Boko Haram members were killed in the attack, but those numbers were unconfirmed.
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