Senior Official, Mayor Among 7 Dead In Cameroon Attack

Yaound�, March 2 (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 3rd Mar, 2022 ) :A senior state official and a mayor were among seven people killed when their convoy was attacked in a restive anglophone region of Cameroon on Wednesday, the regional governor said.

"At around 11 am, the deputy prefect was travelling... in a convoy of four vehicles" in Bekora, southwest Cameroon, the governor of the southwest region Okalia Bilai told state-run CRTV.

As the convoy passed, "terrorists" had "triggered explosives... and began shooting at the car in an ambush," Bilai said, adding that seven people including the deputy prefect, a mayor and a local leader of the ruling RDPC party were killed.

An initial toll given by local sources who requested anonymity had put the death toll at five.

A local official earlier said that a gendarme and the deputy prefect's driver were among the dead.

Cameroon has been torn by violence since October 2017 when militants declared an independent state in the Northwest and neighbouring Southwest Region, home to most of the anglophone minority in the majority French-speaking country.

The authorities responded with a crackdown, and a spiral of violence began that has claimed more than 6,000 lives and forced a million to flee their homes, according to the International Crisis Group (ICG) think-tank.

Eighty-percent of Cameroon's population of 24 million are French-speaking.

The presence of the large anglophone minority is a legacy of the colonial era.

The former German possession of Cameroon was partitioned after World War I between Britain and France.

In 1961, part of the British territory, the Southern Cameroons, joined Cameroon after it gained independence from France.

Over the years, resentment brewed among anglophones over perceived discrimination in key areas, such as education and the judicial system.

But demands for change or a federated state were resisted by President Paul Biya, who at 89 has been in power for nearly 40 years.

The anglophone separatists call their entity the Federal Republic of Ambazonia, from the Ambas Bay on the coastline. It is not recognised internationally.

Monitors of the conflict say that atrocities and other abuses have been carried out by the security forces and the separatists alike.

In November 2021, four students and a teacher were killed in Ekondo-Titi when a secondary school was attacked by armed men.