Cruel: Girl Clubbed To Death, Set Ablaze In Jos

The gruesome manner in which some victims of the Jos massacre were murdered has been revealed by latest photographs of the mass killings and testimonies of the mothers of the victims..

One of the victims is a baby girl who was clubbed to death and then set ablaze by the rampaging Fulani pastoralists.

The iron rod her assailants used to club her to death was left on top of her charred remains.

Women have also narrated how their children were slaughtered right in their presence as they tried to escape.

Chindum Yakubu, who narrated her experience in a hospital in Jos, recalls the moment her 18-month-old daughter was snatched from her back and hacked to death with a machete.

“We were sleeping when we heard gun shots around 2:00 am. I strapped my youngest baby on my back and ran out of the house, but ran into the Fulani attackers,” she said yesterday.

She tried to escape but tripped and fell to the ground.

“They removed the baby and killed her with a machete. I could hear the screams of my baby when they attacked her,” the 30-year-old said.

Violence erupted before dawn on Sunday when attackers armed with machetes, axes and daggers swooped on the mainly Christian villages of Dogo Nahawa, Ratsat and Zot, near Jos.

The rampage has been blamed on Fulani pastoralists, who are Muslim.

Yakubu was beaten with clubs and left for dead. Half of her head is now clean-shaven and a deep cut on her scalp is sutured.

As well as her infant daughter, Yakubu is mourning a seven-year-old son also killed in the slaughter.

She is not alone. The Plateau State Specialist Hospital is full, mostly with wounded women and children.

In the surgical ward lies 35-year-old Mary Gyang, whose scalp also bears wounds.

She was trying to escape from her house, after hearing gunshots, and was ambushed.

“I carried my two-year-old on my back and ran off. But my baby was hit on the head with a machete while I was running,” Gyang said.

“I was also hit at the back of the head, but I kept running and ran into a cousin. It was then I realised my child was dead,” she told AFP from her hospital bed.

Virginia Kaleung, the matron of the surgical ward, said she has had 19 admissions since Sunday.

The injuries showed “that the weapons used were mostly guns, knives, clubs and machetes,” she said.

In the female ward Lydia Anthony, 49, barely able to speak due to a broken nose, is taking care of her 20-year-old niece Mercy, who suffered broken arms and machete cuts all over her body.

Tensions are running high back home, she said.

“At the moment anything can happen, because everybody in the village is angry. Our youths may decide to launch a counter-attack,” she said.

Meanwhile, fresh gunfire has sent Christian villagers in Jos fleeing as a senior official accused the country’s military chiefs of having ignored warnings about last Sunday’s massacre.

Residents of a mainly Christian settlement near the central city of Jos fled to a nearby police barracks for shelter at the sound of gunfire, said locals.

“We heard gunshots reverberating all over the neighbourhood and I could not wait to know who was firing the shots,” Josephine Emmanuel, of Bukka Uku, about four kilometres (three miles) south of Jos, told AFP by phone.

“All people in the neighborhood have fled,” she added.

Just hours earlier, members of the Fulani clan and Berom ethnic activists had clashed nearby, a senior police officer told AFP.

“Some Fulani pastoralists attempted to attack a village and Beroms repelled them,” said the officer speaking on condition of anonymity.

Earlier yesterday, Jonah Jang, governor of central Plateau State, said Sunday’s carnage, which claimed hundreds of lives of mainly Christian villagers, could have been avoided had there not been security lapses.

He had alerted Nigeria’s army commander about reports of movement around the area and had been told that troops would be heading there, Jang told reporters in the capital Abuja.

“Three hours or so later, I was woken by a call that they (armed gangs) have started burning the village and people were being hacked to death.

“I tried to locate the commanders, (but) I couldn’t get any of them on the telephone.”

Near the central city of Jos, mass burials have been held for some of the hundreds of victims of the three-hour orgy of violence, as survivors nursed their wounds in hospitals.

Troops meanwhile patrolled the three villages where members of the mainly Muslim Fulani ethnic group embarked on their killing spree. But residents of neighbouring villages said they had already received new threats.