Fear Grips Bamenda Amid Explosion, Gunshots

Residents of the Bamenda headquarters in the North West Region were filled with fear this Saturday morning after hearing an explosion near City Chemist, a well-known roundabout in the city.

The explosion was followed by gunshots. In videos that MMI has received, residents scampered for safety as a relatively peaceful morning turned chaotic.

Vehicles that headed the City Chemist direction quickly reversed amid traffic jams to escape from the gunfire.

At the moment, MMI cannot confirm if there are any casualties or not.

Reports say separatist fighters invaded the city in an attempt to enforce a lockdown they had imposed.

Lockdowns have been recurrent in Bamenda since 2016, when the ongoing Anglophone Crisis started.

Separatists have often used lockdowns to target important national and local events as a way of enforcing civil disobedience against the government.

The lockdowns have breathed recurrent violence in Bamenda and other parts of Cameroon’s English-speaking regions since 2017, when armed conflict broke out and conflict started between independence-seeking fighters and security and defence forces.

Separatists and the military have been implicated in several atrocities during the conflict.

This includes extrajudicial killing, torture, enforced disappearance, kidnapping, lockdowns, and arbitrary detentions.

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