Eyewitnesses to the Separatist attack in Buea that killed a man and got four cars burnt on Monday, January 29, 2024, have painted a grim picture of how the attack was orchestrated.
The attack occurred at about 8:30 pm near the Divine Mercy Co-Cathedral in Molyko, along the Buea Central Market Road.
One of the eyewitnesses said the gunmen were about seven in number, heavily armed and were dressed in police attire.
Camouflaging like police officers, they began stopping vehicles on the road in the semblance of regular police controls.
But most of the passing vehicles hesitated to stop, so they opened fire.
The eyewitnesses recounted: “It was around 8:30 when we were trying to follow that Senegal match (AFCON). So I came out to make a call because there were network problems in the house. As I was making the call I saw some people standing on the road. They were dressed like the police, in the police kaki, so I could not differentiate between them and the police.
“So taxis were coming down and they tried to stop them but they weren’t stopping. Suddenly I heard gunshots. So I ran into the house because I had never seen police officers shooting at vehicles for not stopping. After shooting for a long time we saw four vehicles burnt and one man was killed,” he said.
Another eyewitness, who spectated the shooting as he took cover near the incident scene said the fighters were heavily armed with automatic rifles and a machine gun.
He also confirmed that they were dressed in police kaki and they were about seven in number.
“One of them was holding a heavy machine gun which he placed on the ground and was firing. One of them shouted that anyone who ventures outside will be killed. They set fire on the vehicles which were in the middle of the road. There was a young man inside one of the vehicles. They asked him to come out but he refused so they set his car on fire, shot him and dragged him out of the car. That’s his blood there,” he told journalists.
In a video that went viral online after the attack, the gunmen claimed they were the “Mountain Lions of Fako,” a separatist armed group controlled by a self-proclaimed “General Sagat”.
The same group was responsible for an attack in Muea on September 7, 2023, that left three people killed and two taxis burnt.
According to the second eyewitness, the fighters said they had come to force people to respect Monday ghost towns, which separatists instituted in 2017 as a form of civil disobedience.
“Their main reason was that people have not been respecting ghost towns which they instituted,” he said.
The lone casualty of the incident was Musonge Derick, a native of Bova village in Buea.
His corpse was brought to the Buea Regional Hospital about midnight on Monday.
Derick, who lost his wife, Becky Jeme Iyabo, in a separatist attack in January 2020, was the cousin of former Prime Minister Peter Mafany Musonge.
His death further devastated the family, which has already bourne the brunt of the ongoing Anglophone Crisis.
The police said one other person, identified as Ejeh John Wonumu, was seriously injured during the recent attack.
Meanwhile, eyewitnesses also told the police that two unidentified women were abducted by the separatists and their whereabouts remained unknown at the time of this report.
In a statement on Tuesday, Cameroon’s Ministry of Communication condemned the attack alongside another which happened in Ndu, North West, days earlier.
The attacks are resurfacing after a period of relative calm in the North West and South West Regions, which have witnessed turbulence for nearly seven years now.
