Abuja: Nearly 200 innocent civilians, including women and children, were killed in an alleged misfire by the Nigerian Air Force at the Jilli market, along the border between the Borno and Yobe states.
The incident happened when military aircraft were hunting for Islamist Boko Haram terrorists, but fired on a gathering at the market instead.
While local residents and Amnesty International say more than 100 people lost their lives, authorities have yet to confirm the death toll. Some hospitals in Yobe state say they are treating those injured.
In a statement, the Nigerian Air Force said it had sent a team “to immediately proceed to the location on a fact-finding mission on the allegation”, the BBC reported.
An injured man said that he had gone to the market to buy animals when he was hit. “I was with about 30 people and we all fell down after being struck,” he told Reuters.
Nigeria’s military, on Sunday, confirmed the strike in a statement, saying it had targeted a location in Jilli “long identified as a major terrorist movement corridor and convergence point for Islamic State West Africa Province terrorists
and their collaborators”.
The statement described it as “a carefully, well-coordinated planned and intelligence-driven operation”. It had “successfully conducted a precision air strike on a known terrorist enclave and logistics hub located near the abandoned village of Jilli”, the military said, as reported by the BBC.
It said “scores of terrorists” were killed in the strike, but did not mention any civilian casualties.
Reuters cited a councillor in Yobe’s Geidam district, Lawan Zanna Nur Geidam, as well as three residents and an official from an international humanitarian agency, who saidup to 200 people might have been killed.
“It’s a very devastating incident,” Geidam said, adding that the injured had been taken to hospitals in Yobe and Borno.
Amnesty International said on X that there were “more than 100 dead” and 35 people seriously wounded.
“We have their pictures and they include children,” Isa Sanusi, Amnesty International’s Nigeria director, told the Associated Press.
“We are in touch with people that are there, we spoke with the hospital,” he said. “We spoke with the person in charge of casualties, and we spoke with the victims,” he said.
Geidam, however, maintained that the casualty figure is said “around 200”. Eight of the injured died in hospital on Sunday, he said.
Nigeria’s north‑east has seen several incidents in recent years in which military air operations against Islamist insurgents have mistakenly hit civilians, including in villages, camps for displaced people and markets.