Nigeria airforce kills 6 civilians in northeast by mistake
Nigerian Airforce fighter jets fly around Nigeria's Aso-Rock in Abuja, Nigeria during the country’s 60th Independence Celebration on 1 October 2020. Nigeria is holding scaled-down celebrations due to the coronavirus pandemic to commemorate six decades since it gained self-rule from Britain in 1960.
Kola Sulaimon / AFP
An army jet killed at least six civilians after mistakenly attacking them while pursuing gangs in northern Nigeria's Katsina state, residents told AFP on Sunday.
It dropped a bomb on a cluster of huts on the outskirts of Zakka village in Safana district on Saturday, three residents said.
The strike came after bandits attacked a police base in the village, killing two policemen and a vigilante assisting them, they added.
"The jet deployed after the bandits had withdrawn and circled the village before striking a cluster of huts belonging to a family outside the village," Muntari Sada, a Zakka resident, told AFP.
"Six members of the family were killed and their body parts had to be collected in bags for burial," said Sada, who attended their funeral.
His account was supported by two other residents who gave the same toll.
Amnesty International put the number of dead at 10, calling in a statement Sunday for an "impartial, transparent and immediate investigation".
The military did not respond to an AFP request for comment.
Nigeria's armed forces have for years been fighting criminal gangs — locally called bandits.
The groups terrorise communities in northwestern and central Nigeria where they raid villages, kill or abduct residents for ransom and burn homes after looting them.
This latest strike is the latest in a series of such incidents in the north of the country.
In January, a military airstrike killed at least 16 people in northwestern Zamfara state after an army jet mistook local vigilantes for criminal gangs active in Zurmi district.
Last December, a military jet killed 10 people and wounded six others when it hit two villages while bombing positions of Lakurawa jihadists in neighbouring Sokoto state.
In December 2023, a Nigerian military airstrike mistook a Muslim religious gathering for bandits in the Tudun Biri community in northwestern Kaduna state.
That attack killed at least 85 people, mainly women and children.
And in January 2017, at least 112 people were killed when a fighter jet struck a camp housing 40,000 people displaced by jihadist violence in the town of Rann near the border with Cameroon.