Nigeria: Military drone strike accidentally kills 85 people

A Nigerian army drone attack accidentally killed at least 85 civilians in a village in northwestern Kaduna state on Sunday, emergency officials said, in one of the country's deadliest military bombings.

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu ordered an investigation on Tuesday after the army acknowledged that one of its drones accidentally struck the village of Tudun Biri while residents were celebrating a Muslim holiday.

The army did not provide casualty figures, but local residents said 85 people, many of them women and children, were killed.

“The North West Zonal Office has received details from local authorities that 85 bodies have been buried so far while the search is still ongoing,” the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) said in a statement.

NEMA said another 66 people were hospitalized, but emergency officials were still negotiating with community leaders to calm tensions so they could reach the village.

“President Tinubu describes the incident as very unfortunate, disturbing and distressing, expressing outrage and sorrow at the tragic loss of Nigerian lives,” the presidency said in a statement.

Nigeria's armed forces often rely on airstrikes in their battle against so-called bandit militias in the country's northwest and northeast, where jihadists have been fighting for more than a decade. Sometimes these militias disguise themselves as civilians in order to easily slip through the army's controls. In this case, however, the armed forces moved in a superficial way, causing a terrible massacre of civilians.

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The article Nigeria: Military drone attack accidentally kills 85 people comes from Economic Scenarios .

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This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/nigeria-un-attacco-di-droni-militari-uccide-accidentalmente-85-persone/ on Tue, 05 Dec 2023 14:18:38 +0000.