By Chris Muhizi for MCN.
The Bamenda regional governor claimed on Monday that gunmen killed ten people and injured two more at a key junction in the city of Bamenda in Cameroon’s volatile northwest.
According to a witness, the attackers arrived in vehicles late on Sunday, ordered everyone to the ground, accusing them of failing to support local separatists, and then opened fire while some obeyed and others fled.
The Ambazonia Defence Forces (ADF), the primary separatist organization in the English-speaking region that has been fighting since 2017 in protest of alleged marginalization at the hands of the majority French-speaking government, denied culpability.
The governor of the North West region, Adolphe Lele Lafrique, told Reuters that a manhunt had been initiated for the “terrorists” behind the killing. “We are conducting investigations and will issue a statement on this.”
At around 7:30 p.m. (18:30 GMT), men in military uniforms arrived in two cars to raid Nacho Junction, which houses restaurants, bars, and businesses.
According to Aljazeera,They shot at people indiscriminately, according to the witness, before fleeing.
“There is a possibility that it was revenge killing,” ADF spokesperson Lucas Asu stated, implying that the attackers were masked as rebel fighters.
Disagreements between the French and English academic, judicial, and administrative systems, as well as accusations of political and economic marginalization, culminated in a series of protests and riots in 2016.
The violent suppression of those protests sparked a full-fledged conflict that has killed over 6,000 people in Anglophone Cameroon since.
