Government Says 34 Killed in Raid on Central Nigerian Village
Authorities in Nigeria's central Plateau state said Thursday that 34 people were killed in a brutal village raid in the center of the country, in a revised deathtoll after the attack earlier this week.
State Information Commissioner Yiljap Abraham said that 34 people were killed, 24 injured and 600 people displaced in the attack by gunmen on Shonong village in Plateau state on Monday.
He added that 56 houses were burned down during the raid.
The state police chief Chris Olakpe had on Tuesday put the death toll at 17, with five of the victims burnt beyond recognition.
Witnesses and survivors described how gunmen attacked the village on Monday in the Riyom area of the state, which along with neighboring Kaduna has been plagued by communal strife.
The attackers, suspected to be ethnic Fulani herdsmen, also killed or took away animals in the latest outbreak of violence blamed on long-standing ethnic divisions.
Local television stations on Wednesday showed footage of the victims who were given a mass burial.
Plateau and Kaduna lie in Nigeria's so-called Middle Belt, where the country's majority Muslim north meets the predominantly Christian south.
Human Rights Watch said last month that more than 10,000 people had died in the two states in brutal tit-for-tat violence since 1992 purely because of their religious or ethnic identity.
Several thousand of those had lost their lives since 2010, the rights monitor added.
Source: Agence France Presse
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