A young teenage girl tore off the explosives and fled immediately as she was out of sight of her handlers, she was Strapped with a bosom y-trapped vest and sent by Boko Haram to kill. Later found by local self-defense forces, the girl’s tearful account is one of the first indications that at least some of the child bombers used by Boko Haram are aware that they are about to die and kill others.
Her two companions, however, completed their grisly mission and walked into a crowd of hundreds at Dikwa refugee camp in northeast Nigeria and blew themselves up, killing 58 people.
Her story was corroborated when she led soldiers to the unexploded vest, Awami said Thursday by phone from the refugee camp, which holds 50,000 people who have fled Boko Haram’s Islamic uprising.
“She said she was scared because she knew she would kill people, but she was also frightened of going against the instructions of the men who brought her to the camp,” said Modu Awami, a self-defense fighter who helped question the girl”.
[vc_row][vc_column width=”1/2″]Awami said he had no information about how the girl came to be with Boko Haram. The extremists have kidnapped thousands of people and there are fears they may be turning their captives into weapons.[/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/2″]The girl is in custody and has given officials information about other planned bombings that has helped them increase security at the camp, Satomi Ahmed, chairman of the Borno State Emergency Management Agency, told reporters.[/vc_column][/vc_row]
An army bomb disposal expert has told the AP that some suicide bombs are detonated remotely, so the carriers may not have control over when the bomb goes off.
Even two days later, it’s difficult to say exactly how many people died at Dikwa because there were corpses and body parts everywhere, including in the cooking pots, Awami said.