Two Soldiers Wounded in Eyumojock hostilities
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| Two BIR soldiers were wounded in an explosion at Ekok borders as a military reinforcement tried to pursue separatist fighters |
Two BIR soldiers were reported wounded as Gunmen attacked
the Customs and Gendarmerie posts at the border town of Ekok in Manyu Division
of the Southwest region on Thursday.
The BIR
soldiers were wounded as unidentified assailants exploded their vehicle at the
entrance into Ekok, said a security source who witnessed the incident. He added
that the assailants launched their assault from Nigeria.
Four
security agents and a customs official also described the incident, saying the
unidentified gunmen launched their attack on the Ekok border post along Cross
River.
"They
came around 3 a.m. They came from Nigeria and there were many of them. They had
heavy weapons. They had grenades. They were shooting everywhere," said one
police source, who like the other witnesses asked not to be identified.
Speaking
from Ekok by telephone and still clearly shaken, a police officer said the
shooting lasted nearly three hours and the border remained closed on Thursday
morning.
"Some
of these guys came from the riverside (beneath the bridge). We don't know exactly
which path they took, but all of them came from Nigeria," another security
source told Reuters.
A
Nigerian military spokesman denied the assailants had crossed over from
Nigeria, and the incident is likely to further damage relations between the two
neighbours, strained over the rise of an Anglophone Cameroonian separatist
movement.
The
witnesses said several people including two BIR soldiers had been injured in
the attack, without giving details.
Communications
Minister Issa Tchiroma Bakary, while acknowledging the attack, said no one had
been hurt or killed.
"The
attackers used explosives to destroy two vehicles belonging to the BIR (Rapid
Intervention Brigade)," he said, declining to comment on whether the
gunmen had come from Nigeria.
Nigerian
military spokesman John Agim said Nigerian authorities had spotted armed men on
the Cameroonian side of the border, but denied that they had either crossed
from or into Nigeria.
Cameroon
is made up mostly of territory that gained independence from France in 1960,
which was combined a year later with a much smaller former British colony.
Today, about a fifth of the population speaks English,
mostly along the Nigerian border. Many of them complain of marginalization by
the French-speaking majority.
The Anglophone separatist movement, once limited to the
fringe, has grown in strength and popularity since the Yaounde regime began a
crack down on peaceful protests.
Cameroonian
military officials and pro-government media accuse Nigeria of sheltering the
insurgents, who since last year have waged a guerrilla campaign to establish an
independent homeland for the English-speaking minority.
Nigerian
authorities arrested a leading member of the separatists and nine of his
followers as they held a meeting at a hotel in the capital Abuja earlier this
month.
Reuters
reported last month that Cameroonian troops crossed into Nigeria in pursuit of
the rebels without seeking authorisation from Nigeria, provoking a
behind-the-scenes rift between two nations with a history of fraught relations.
The
militaries of Cameroon and Nigeria repeatedly clashed over the disputed Bakassi
peninsula in the 1980s and 90s. The status of the territory was settled in
Cameroon's favour by The Hague-based International Court of Justice in 2002 and
in recent years the two countries have cooperated extensively to stamp out the
Islamist militant group Boko Haram.
More
than 43,000 refugees, nearly three times more than previously thought, have
fled to Nigeria amid Cameroonian military operations against the separatists,
Nigerian aid officials said on Thursday.
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