Vigilante asks the Military not take all the glory.

70 Boko Haram suspects killed in Borno raid – Officials

After a gun battle with security operatives, about 70 members of Boko Haram were killed on Saturday in villages near Chibok Town where the insurgents had on April 14 abducted over 250 schoolgirls.
However, the Nigerian military and members of the Nigerian Vigilante Group, formerly called Civilian JTF, disagreed on who should take credit for the killing of the insurgents.
The officials of the Nigeria Vigilante were the first to break the news that after a heated gun battle between their men and the Boko Haram terrorists in villages near Chibok, they killed over 40 members of the terrorist group, losing six of their own men in the process.
They also claimed to have handed over 15 Boko Haram members to the soldiers in Chibok local government.
“But to our utter dismay, the military are now claiming that they were the ones that killed all the insurgents and even those we arrested alive and handed over to them,” said Muhammed Gava, the spokesperson of the vigilante group who spoke on behalf of its state commander.
The Director Defense Information, Chris Olukolade, a Major General, in response to text messages from journalists seeking official confirmation of the reported killing simply answered, “Yes, it happened.”
The villagers in Chibok Town had told PREMIUM TIMES that they saw Air Force jets dropping bombs in villages called Chuha I and Chuha II as well as Kwarangilam on Saturday after Boko Haram gunmen had attacked the villages, sacked the residents, and killed about 40 people, including six members of the Nigeria Vigilante.
A Kwarangilam resident, Joshua Yakubu, told journalists in a telephone interview that on Sunday morning when the terrorists that attacked their villages were moving towards Sambisa, they suffered a counter attack from a military jet that dropped bombs on them, killing almost all of them.
“We are happy with the gallant effort displayed by the military, for the quick intervention which led to the killing of dozens of terrorists who wreaked havoc in our communities over the weekend. Almost all of them were wiped out while attempting to flee,” said Mr. Yakubu.
“Initially when we started hearing some deafening sounds of explosions at the outskirt of our villages, we thought the end of the world had come. But interestingly, we later confirmed that the explosions were from troops targeted at the fleeing terrorists that attacked and killed many of our people.”
Some other sources said they saw many dead and mangled bodies of the terrorists still lying on the ground and others hanging on branches of trees and shrubs at the scene of the bombardment.
But the vigilante group argued that even if they had not killed up to 70 of the Boko Haram gunmen in the attack, “the military cannot say it was the one that single-handedly killed those terrorists.”
“Everyone knew how our men showed rare courage on Saturday night by laying in ambush for the Boko Haram people when the soldiers were not there to protect them. We lost six of our members during the gun battle, and we were able to kill scores of the insurgents using our hunting rifles and our local charms that prevented them from seeing where we were firing from.
“We went to bury six of our members on Sunday in Chibok; so it will be unfair for the military to say that they were the ones that killed all the 70 of the insurgents,” Mr. Gava said.