South West: Amba boys attack GTC Tinto, shoot principal after promising to disrupt the school year

By Tata Mbunwe

Separatist fighters (Amba boys) reportedly shot the principal of Government Technical School, GTC Tinto, Felix Tambe Ashu during an attack on the school in the Manyu division on Saturday morning.

A source in Tinto has said the armed boys attacked the school at about 8:13 am, sending teachers and students fleeing, but the principal got a bullet shot on the leg.

A girl, who was hiding in the bush, also suffered injuries from the military as she was mistaken for one of the fighters.

Security and defense forces came to the scene moments after the boys had disappeared into their hideouts.
Our source said the Amba boys had threatened last December 2020 to disrupt the 2020/2021 school year in Tinto.

A faction of separatist leaders, including incarcerated Ambazonia leaders, Sisiku Ayuk Tabe, had favored school resumption for the first time during the start of the current academic year in October 2020.

However, attacks on schools did not stop as several school children were massacred in the town of Kumba on October 24, others harassed at a school in Limbe, and several teachers of a Presbyterian Secondary School in Kumbo, North West Region, were kidnapped and later released.

The Cameroon government vowed to crushed fighters who refuse to join the Disarmament, Demobilisation, and Reintegration centers created in the North West and South West regions to re-orientate repentant separatist fighters.

Observers of the four-year-long Anglophone crisis say uneasy calm is returning to some localities in the embattled Northwest and Southwest regions, especially with a partial resumption of community schools in some parts of Lebialem division, one of the strongholds of separatist fighters in the South West region.

Equally, at least 800 Cameroonian refugees in Nigeria returned home to the Eyumojock subdivision in the Southwest region where they received government aid.

Recent attacks by separatist fighters have centered on state institutions and authorities, with the recent killing of a traditional ruler in the Southwest in December and the attack on government officials this January 2021 that left the Momo (North West region) Divisional Communication Delegate dead.