Boko Haram captures men and boys in raid

Suspected Islamist Boko Haram fighters have abducted dozens of boys and men in a raid on a remote village in northeast Nigeria, loading them on trucks and driving them off, said witnesses who fled the violence this weekend.

The kidnappings come four months after Boko Haram, which is fighting to reinstate an Islamic caliphate in religiously mixed Nigeria, abducted more than 200 schoolgirls from the village of Chibok. They are still missing.

Several witnesses who fled after the raid early in the week on Doron Baga, a sandy fishing village near the shores of Lake Chad, said militants clothed in military and police uniforms had burned several houses and that 97 people were unaccounted for.

"They left no men or boys in the place, only young children, girls and women," said Halima Adamu, sobbing softly and looking exhausted after a 180km road trip on the back of a truck to Maiduguri, capital of the northeastern state of Borno.

"They were shouting 'Allah Akbar' [God is great], shooting sporadically. There was confusion everywhere. They started forcing our men and boys into their vehicles, threatening to shoot whomever disobeyed them. Everybody was scared."

They said six older men were killed in the raid and another five people were wounded.

Boko Haram, seen as the number one security threat to Africa's top economy and oil producer, has dramatically increased attacks on civilians in the past year.

The movement has rapidly lost popular support as it gets more bloodthirsty.

Its solution - kidnapping boys and forcing them to fight and abducting girls as sex slaves - is a chilling echo of Ugandan rebel Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army, which has operated in the same way in Uganda, South Sudan and central Africa for decades.

The military did not respond to a request for comment. A security source said they were aware of the incident.

The kidnappers overpowered local vigilantes who had no support because there is no military presence there, the villagers said.