It was an explosion- Cameroon army reacts to massacre of 22 people

Reacting to the attack that claimed the lives of 22 people yesterday in the Northwest region, the Cameroon army blamed the loss of civilian lives on a fuel explosion which occurred during a firefight.

Opposition parties had accused the army of orchestrating a massacre, but army spokesman Colonel Cyrille Atonfack Guemo described the allegations as “duplicitous.”

According to the army, the fuel was set ablaze during a gun battle with the anglophone separatists.

Five civilians, a woman, and four children died, and “seven terrorists” were “neutralised”, Atonfack told AFP in Libreville by phone.

More than 3,000 people have died and at least 700,000 have fled their homes.

“It was quite simply an unfortunate accident, the collateral result of security operations in the region,” Atonfack said in a statement.

The attack was triggered by four soldiers and two gendarmes who had been carrying out nighttime reconnaissance on foot near a home that had been “transformed into a fortress” with a stockpile of weapons.

They came under heavy fire, and exchanges caused “several containers of fuel to explode, followed by a blaze which spread several neighboring homes”, Atonfack said.

Recall that yesterday, 22 people were killed in an attack on a village in north-west Cameroon, as reported by mynigeria.com.

Over half those killed in Ntumbo were children, and local media reported that several victims were burned alive.