Cameroonian troops have recovered a Nigerian armoured personnel carrier captured by Boko Haram militants when they overran Gwoza town last year. The vehicle spattered with blood and riddled with bullets has been towed into an army base in northern Cameroon.
It still bears the insignia “PMF Training College, Gwoza” along its flank, partially obscured by Boko Haram scrawled in Arabic.
On Monday, guerrillas used the carrier to ambush an army patrol near Waza, a town on the Cameroon side of the border, killing five and wounding seven before launching an all-out assault on a nearby Cameroonian army camp.
After a firefight lasting nearly three hours and involving heavy and long-range artillery, Cameroonian soldiers repulsed the attack, leaving 94 Boko Haram fighters dead, according to officials. Farmers discovered eight more bodies in fields on Tuesday, when Reuters visited Waza with a Cameroonian military patrol.
A pool of blood and dozens of spent cartridges lay on the floor of the armored personnel carrier, whose side windows had pierced by several heavy machine-gun rounds.
The vehicle was towed into the Waza encampment after the battle.
“The combat was of a rare intensity. This was something we had not witnessed before,” said Major Oumar Nchankou, head of Cameroonian special forces in Waza, who was lucky to escape alive after two rockets hit his vehicle in the initial ambush.
Nchankou was shot in the knee by a Boko Haram militant just 10 meters away but is still able to walk, albeit with a limp.
“It showed that we are fighting an enemy that knows what it is doing,” he told reporters in Maroua, the regional capital.
