
Mamudo - They crept up to the school under cover of darkness, armed with petrol and automatic weapons.
Most
of the teachers and pupils had fled, but some students, one teacher
and headmaster Adanu Haruna were still in the compound, one of many
rural boarding schools in Nigeria surrounded by forest and farmland.
"They
made the students line up and strip naked, then they made the ones
with pubic hair lie face down on the ground," Haruna said, eyes wide
with horror at describing the attack on the iron-roofed school built by
British colonisers in the 1950s.
"They shot them point blank then set the bodies on fire."
The
Mamudo government school, charred and smelling of scorched blood after
22 students and a teacher were killed there in the July 6 attack near
Potiskum in Nigeria's northeast, was the fourth to be targeted by
suspected Boko Haram militants in less than a month.
The attacks
reveal much about the rebels who are fighting to revive a medieval
Islamic caliphate in northern Nigeria, the type of state they are
seeking to establish and the impact of their efforts.
In a video
uploaded to the Internet on Saturday, Boko Haram's purported leader
Abubakar Shekau denied ordering the latest killings, saying Boko Haram
does not itself kill small children, but he praised attacks on Western
schools.
"We fully support the attack on school in Mamudo, as well
as on other schools," he said. "Western education schools are against
Islam ... We will kill their teachers."
Boko Haram, a nickname
which translates roughly as "Western education is sinful", formed
around a decade ago as a clerical movement opposed to Western
influence, which the sect's founder, Mohammed Yusuf, said was poisoning
young minds against Islam.
Yet security forces and politicians
were the main targets of the armed revolt it started after Yusuf's
killing in a 2009 military crackdown that left 800 people dead.
Since
those days Boko Haram has splintered into several factions, including
some with ties to al Qaeda's Saharan wing, which analysts say operate
more or less independently, despite Shekau's loose claim to authority
over them.
Before June, there had been only a handful of attacks on the Western-style schools it so despises.
An
offensive against the insurgents since President Goodluck Jonathan
declared a state of emergency in three remote northern states in May,
wresting control of the far northeast from Boko Haram and pushing its
fighters into hiding, has changed that.
Across northeastern
Nigeria, schools are emptying out, threatening further radicalisation
and economic decline in a region left behind by the country's oil-rich
Christian south.
Nassir Salaudeen, a teacher whose son was killed
in a strike on Damaturu government school on June 16, the first of the
wave of recent attacks, said he had put all his efforts into his boy's
education in the hope he would get a good job.