“God helped me. When the fighters caught us, they lined us up on the ground. I put my head on my hands. The bullet hit me in my back and went through my hands. I was in agony. Blood was flowing through my hands. The fighters assumed they had shot me in the head and thought I was dead. They left me lying there.”

Alhaji Muhammad, a mechanic in Kilangar, told RNI reporter Aisha Jamal that he had tried to run away when the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) stormed the village in the Askira-Uba Local Government Area of Borno State on Sunday, December 19.

“I was welding in my workshop when they arrived. I starting running to my home but they surrounded me and I had no option but to go with them. They took me on to the street where there were five other villagers who had also been caught.”

Muhammad said the first thing the fighters asked was whether they were Muslims or Christians.

“When we told them our faith was Muslim, they told us that we were no longer one because we, as Muslims, sided with the Christians in the village. They said we were all to blame because we called the troops which, they said, fought with them and dehumanised them, so we all needed to be punished.”

Muhammad said the attackers made them lie on the ground. “They pulled out a camcorder and a phone and took pictures. They started shooting us one after the other. Blood was spilling on to the ground. They didn’t stop taking pictures and recording us until all were shot.”

He said while he was lying there he was finding it difficult to breathe: “My breath kept seizing up from time to time. I knew I was in a critical condition when I saw all the blood flowing from my body. I thought I was dying.”

Muhammad said he lay bleeding for hours until the attackers left.

“I managed to get home and my brother and another person took me to hospital in Mubi.”

One of the other five men shot with Muhammad was now in Yola town in Adamawa State nursing broken bones from the bullets, he said.

A “good Samaritan” had given survivors of the attack 10,000 naira.

The Borno State government sent delegates to Kilangar on Tuesday, December 21, where they disbursed 5.2 million naira among the families of the deceased and to those in hospital.

The attack occurred just hours after President Muhammadu Buhari had claimed that insurgents had been weakened by his government.

Speaking at the third edition of the Turkey-Africa Partnership Summit on Saturday, Buhari said the insurgents were only “preying on soft targets”.