Eduardo González
Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares condemned on Friday the attacks carried out this week by armed groups in Nigeria, which resulted in the deaths of nearly 200 people and the kidnapping of more than 25 women and girls.
“I strongly condemn the attacks perpetrated on Tuesday in Woro and Katsina, Nigeria, in which more than 25 women and girls were kidnapped and 200 people lost their lives,” Albares wrote on social media. These acts “go against peace and human rights,” he continued. “My solidarity with Yusuf Maitama Tuggar,” Nigeria’s Foreign Minister, and with “the friendly Nigerian people,” he concluded.
Nearly 200 people were killed by armed groups in several remote villages in central and northern Nigeria, according to local authorities. In Kwara State, in the west-central part of Nigeria, an armed group attacked the town of Woro on Tuesday, killing at least 175 people. Separately, at least 21 people died in another attack in Katsina State, in the north.
The victims of the Kwara attack were Muslims who had refused to renounce Nigeria’s Constitution and embrace Sharia, or Islamic law. President Bola Tinubu announced on Wednesday the deployment of an army battalion to Kwara State and accused “Boko Haram terrorists” of killing dozens of “defenseless villagers.”
UN Secretary-General António Guterres has “strongly condemned the terrorist attack” in Kwara State, and the African Union has denounced this “heinous and barbaric act” as an unacceptable attack on security and peace.
Amnesty International has reported the deaths of 170 people in this attack and stated that many of the victims were shot at point-blank range and even burned alive. It has also called for an investigation and lamented the “alarming absence of any form of security to protect lives.”
