By Patrick MARKEY
Lagos, Nigeria — A Nigerian army drone strike accidently killed at least 85 civilians on Sunday in a village in northwest Kaduna State, officials said, in one of the country’s deadliest military bombing mishaps.
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu on Tuesday ordered an investigation after the army acknowledged one of its drones aimed at armed groups had accidently struck the Tudun Biri village as residents were celebrating a Muslim festival.
The army did not give any casualty figures, but local residents had said 85 people, many of them women and children, had been killed.
“The Northwest Zonal Office has received details from the local authorities that 85 dead bodies have so far been buried while search is still ongoing,” National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) said in a statement.
NEMA said another 66 people were being treated at hospital, but emergency officials were still negotiating with community leaders to calm tensions to be able reach the village.
Nigeria’s armed forces often rely on air strikes in their battle against bandit militias in the northwest and northeast of the country, where jihadists have been fighting for more than a decade.
“President Tinubu describes the incident as very unfortunate, disturbing, and painful, expressing indignation and grief over the tragic loss of Nigerian lives,” the presidency said in a statement.
The army had said its drone was a routine mission that “inadvertently affected members of the community”.
Many of the victims were women, children and elderly who had been celebrating the Muslim festival of Maulud.
“I was inside the house when the first bomb was dropped… We rushed to the scene to help those affected and then a second bomb was dropped,” local resident Idris Dahiru told AFP.
“My aunt, my brother’s wife and her six children, wives of my four brothers were among the dead. My elder brother’s family are all dead, except his infant child who survived.”
Militia gangs have long terrorised parts of northwest Nigeria, operating from bases deep in forests and raiding villages to loot and kidnap residents for ransom.
In the northeast, jihadists have been pushed back from the territory they held at the height of the conflict, though they continue to fight on in rural areas.
More than 40,000 people have been killed and two million displaced since 2009 in that conflict.
Nigerian military bombing raids have accidently hit civilians in the past.
At least 20 fishermen were killed and several injured in a September 2021 attack in Kwatar Daban Masara on Lake Chad in the northeast, when the military mistook them for militants.
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.
The Nigerian military blamed “lack of appropriate marking of the area” in a report issued six months later.
