The death toll from the weekend attacks in Madamai and Kacecere villages of Kaura and Zangon Kataf local government areas in the Southern senatorial district of Kaduna State has risen to 45 as security agents on Tuesday recovered three additional corpses.
Daily Trust gathered that a mass burial for those killed in Madamai village of Kaura LG had been scheduled for Thursday, while those killed in Kacecere in Zangon Kataf LGA were buried on Monday according to Islamic rites.
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Kaduna State Commissioner of Internal Security and Home Affairs, Samuel Aruwan, Tuesday said security reports indicated that from the three additional corpses recovered, two were from the Madamai attack which had earlier claimed 34 lives while one corpse was found in Kacecere where eight people were earlier killed in reprisal.
According to Aruwan, search-and-rescue operations were still in progress.
However, our correspondent gathered that survivors from the Kacecere attack had fled to Zango Urban District in the Atyap Chiefdom of Zangon Kataf Local Government Area.
Shu’aibu Tanimu, a survivor of the attack told our reporter that they fled their homes for safety, adding that four people were still missing from the attack.
A resident of Madamai village in Kaura Local Government Area, Derek Christopher, said most of the residents that lost their homes to the attack had fled to relatives in neighbouring communities since there was no IDP camp in the area.
Narrating her ordeal, a 79-year-old woman from Zangon Kataf who gave her name as Habiba Ibrahim said assailants chopped off her hand with a cutlass and left her in the pool of her blood
She told our reporter at the Sir Patrick Ibrahim Yakowa Memorial Hospital in Kafanchan, before she was transferred to an undisclosed hospital with three others for special treatment.
Habiba said she was trying to escape with other women and children when the attackers stormed their village and started shooting sporadically.
She said a bullet by one of the assailants had grazed her neck, forcing her to the ground. She narrated how in an attempt to crawl to a nearby bush for safety, one of the assailants who had already surrounded her asked for a cutlass which he used to severe her hand.
“I was about to die if not for the military intervention who rescued me and brought me to the hospital,” she said.
