Boko Haram Threat Letter: Bama, Gwoza Residents Abandon Homes, Livelihood For Safety

The banned Boko Haram sect has literarily sent residents of Bama and Gwoza communities running after issuing threat letters of an impending bloodbath in the next seven days.

An online out-fit said the sect in several threat letters written in Kanuri and Hausa languages, warned residents of the towns, who are civil servants, “to resign their jobs and burn their employment documents or risk being consumed by the impending war.”

Escapees from Bama were forced to take bush routes through Dikwa, a town 60km away from Bama and 150km from Maiduguri to get to the state capital. The escapees said they paid at least N7000, as against the normal N300, as transport fare before taxi drivers accepted to risk the dangerous escape journey to the state capital.

A fleeing Bama resident, Abba Fannami, at Muna Park along Maiduguri-Dikwa Road, where most of the escapees arrived in Maiduguri, said that “it cost me about N50, 000 to transport my six family members to Maiduguri. It was a bad experience for many people in the bush, especially women and children.”

“They had warned government officials and civil servants in Bama to resign or else face death in the next 7 days; we are all scared, this could be more deadly, so we have to run for our dear lives,” Mr. Fannami said.

In Gwoza, insurgents, who were forced by soldiers to flee their camps in Sambisa Game Reserve to the rocky hills of Gwoza, have been terrorising their new host communities. The insurgents were said to have taken over most outskirts of Gwoza including Pulka and Kirawatowns, forcing residents to flee into neighbouring Cameroun villages of Mura and Marwa, some 75km away from Nigeria’s borders.

A police constable serving in Gwoza, who sought anonymity said that some residents of Gwoza suburbs were forced to hide inside rock caves as Boko Haram insurgents sacked them from their homes.

(NAN)