Suspected Boko Haram gunmen have shot dead 29 farm workers as they tilled their fields in a village in the remote northeast, a police source said on Thursday. The source at police headquarters for Borno state, in the heart of the insurgency, said around 10 more people had been wounded in Wednesday's attack on Chukku Nguddoa, in which most of the village, including its grain store, were razed. In the past two months, Boko Haram militants have stepped up their five-year-old campaign to carve an Islamic state out of religiously mixed Nigeria. They have relentlessly targeted civilians, especially in the northeast, whom the military seems helpless to protect. Bomb attacks are growing more sophisticated, including two on the capital Abuja last month, and massacres of villagers in the area where Boko Haram is based are an almost daily occurrence. Militants killed 17 people in Alagarno village on Tuesday and razed several houses to the ground.. Hours earlier, a double bomb blast in the central Nigerian city of Jos killed 118 people, according to the emergency services, while men on motorbikes had killed nine people in a raid on the nearby village of Shawa on Monday. While authorities suspect Boko Haram of carrying out all these attacks, there have been no claims of responsibility. Boko Haram has no direct line of communication with the Western press and its purported leader, Abubakar Shekau, claims only occasional attacks - including the abduction of more than 200 schoolgirls from a village last month - through videos circulated to local journalists. http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/101999.aspx
