Death toll from Boko Haram attack rises to 143 -Nigerian official

                 
The death toll from an Islamist militant assault on travellers along a road in northeast Nigeria has risen to 143, an official from the local branch of the Environmental Protection Agency said on Friday.           

In the attack on Tuesday, Boko Haram militants wearing military uniforms stopped traffic on a highway between the cities of Maiduguri and Damaturu, dragging people out of their vehicles and killing them, witnesses and security sources said. The initial toll was given as more than 20.          

"We have been picking corpses off the roadsides all day, there are more in the bush, they are all travellers shot at or slaughtered by Boko Haram gunmen who attacked on Tuesday night. We have so far picked up 143 corpses," the official, Abdulazeez Kolomi, said.             

Early on Friday, a shootout in Nigeria's capital between security forces and suspected Boko Haram Islamist gunmen killed at least seven people, a doctor said at the hospital where the bodies were brought in.                      

Nigeria's secret service said Nigerian forces and Boko Haram clashed near the Apo residential compound for lawmakers in Abuja, the first clash involving Islamist militants in the capital this year.                           

The doctor, who declined to be named because he was not authorised to speak, was in a morgue near the compound, where a Reuters reporter saw a police truck stacked with bodies.                              


REUTERS