At least 14 people were killed by gunmen in the western region of Niger, security authorities said Monday.
Niger’s interior ministry said gunmen on motorcycles killed 14 people in an area in the west of the country, Reuters reported.
The assailants killed nine people in the fields, three in a nearby village and two people who were walking back to the village in the rural commune of Banibangou on Sunday afternoon, the ministry said in a statement on national television.
The statement said the identity of the attackers was not known. However, previous attacks in Niger’s western Tillabery region have been attributed by local officials to an affiliate of Daesh (ISIS), including raids in January that killed at least 100 civilians.
Tillabery sits on Niger’s border with Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, and has been the scene of bloody attacks by takfiri groups linked to al-Qaeda and Daesh for years.
