Bamenda: State Forces Blamed For Killing Four Children Mistaken For Armed Separatists

The Cameroon military has been faulted for killing four teenagers in Meta Quarters, a locale in Mankon, Cameroon’s northwestern city of Bamenda.

The Voice and other local media outlets quoted eyewitnesses as saying that soldiers killed the quartet point-blank around 2:00 pm on Saturday, January 23, 2021.

The soldiers were in search of armed separatists in the area when the incident happened.

Three of the four victims, Ngalim Alucious, Ntakah Nelly Mbah, and Sale Sadam are residents of Old Town while the fought, Brian, lived in Meta Quarters.

According to eyewitnesses, soldiers found the teenagers smoking weed in an uncompleted building.

“They were killed in an uncompleted story-building by the military when they were caught smoking hard drugs,” The Voice quotes an eyewitness who preferred anonymity.

Locals say the military had been drawn to Meta Quarters by gunshots fired by armed separatists who apparently fled before the military zoomed in.

Saturday’s incident in Bamenda is not isolated. Cameroon-Info.Net recalls that there have been at least three other killings similar to the Meta Quarters executions.

On Thursday, May 28, 2020, the state military conducted an offensive raid around the neighborhood of Upper Bunduma, Buea, which led to the killing of four unarmed young men, according to the Centre for Human Rights and Democracy in Africa, CHRDA.

“The incident took place in an uncompleted building, where the young men were allegedly caught smoking weed before being executed by the military,” CHRDA said.

The people of Bakweri Town, Sandpit area in Buea, on Monday, July 30, 2018, experienced one of their greatest horrors in memory, when masked elements of the Rapid Intervention Battalion (BIR) moved into Bakweri Town and massacred youths, took some away and executed them in neighboring Muea, leaving communities behind wailing and mourning their children and friends.

On September 27, 2018, soldiers rounded up six young men around Babouti quarters in Buea Town in the early hours of the morning before shooting them dead. A stray bullet caught a seventh person, an elderly man who gave up the ghost.

So far, as at press time, no Government official had made any statement on the killings.