Amnesty International suggested the attack of Boko Haram in Nijeria on January 3rd leaving hundreds of dead bodies as the `deadliest massacre` in the history of Boko Haram.
Mike Omeri, the government spokesman on the insurgency, said fighting continued Friday for Baga, a town on the border with Chad where Islamic extremists seized a key military base on January 3 and attacked again on Wednesday.
Most of the victims are children, women and elderly people who could not run fast enough when insurgents drove into Baga, firing rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles on town residents, said sources from Boko Haram. An Amnesty International statement said there are reports the town was razed and as many as 2,000 people killed.
The previous bloodiest day in the uprising involved soldiers gunning down unarmed detainees freed in a March 14, 2014, attack on Giwa military barracks in Maiduguri city. Amnesty said then that satellite imagery indicated more than 600 people were killed that day.
The 5-year insurgency killed more than 10,000 people last year alone, according to the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations. More than a million people are displaced inside Nigeria and hundreds of thousands have fled across its borders into Chad, Cameroon and Nigeria.