Nigerian government soldiers, who witnesses said fled into neighboring Cameroon during a clash with a large number of Islamic fighters of Boko Haram, handed over their weapons to Cameroonian authorities and were on their way back to Nigeria, the Nigerian defense headquarters said.
Basuma Muhammed, a resident of Gamboru-Ngala, a town neighboring Cameroon where the clash took place Monday, said soldiers joined hundreds of civilians who fled into Cameroon.
Cameroon army spokesman Didier Badjek, in an interview with the BBC, put the number of Nigerian soldiers who fled across the border at 480. Nigeria's defense headquarters said in a statement posted on the Internet Monday that the soldiers were on their way back to Nigeria after following protocol by handing over "their weapons in order to assure the friendly country that they were not on a hostile mission."
Initially, the soldiers in the town were able to repel an attack by Boko Haram, killing many of their fighters, Muhammed said. "But hours after the attack, a bigger number of the Boko Haram gunmen arrived from the other side of the town and engaged the soldiers who could not stand their superior force and had to join us in running into Cameroon."
The defense headquarters statement said the Nigerian soldiers had performed a "tactical maneuver" when they found themselves in Cameroon.
In Maiduguri, the capital of Nigeria's Borno state and where the military joint task force has its headquarters, a junior officer said his colleagues who spoke with him from Cameroon described running out of ammunition and facing well-armed Islamic fighters. The officer insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press.
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