Cameroon troops recover Nigerian armoured carrier from sect

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 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 fire-fight 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.