The Islamist militant group Boko Haram killed 56 people in the remote village of Baanu in Borno state.
The news was confirmed by the governor Kashim Shettima during a meeting with the parents of 219 abducted girls from Chibok on the 500th day of their captivity.
"I want us all to understand that the Boko Haram crisis is a calamity that has befallen us," Shettima said. "The insurgents do not discriminate whether somebody is Christian or Muslim, neither do they have any tribal sympathy or affiliations. Just yesterday they killed 56 people in Baanu village of Nganzai local government. As I am speaking to you their corpses are still littered on the street of the village because virtually everyone in the village had to run for their lives."
The villagers had to flee Baanu as it was under attack by the militants on the night of August 28.
"We returned back to the village in the morning after spending the night in the bush, we saw corpses in the streets of the village," Mustapha Alibe, a local farmer, told AP.
Boko Haram says that it wants to topple the Nigerian government. In April, the extremist organization kidnapped 276 girls from a secondary school in the state of Borno. Out of them, about 57 escaped but the rest remain in the group's captivity at its suspected hideout near Cameroonian border.
Boko Haram has been active since 2009, killing, raping, and abducting the citizens of the country, leading to the decimation of about 20,000 people, even as more than 1.5 million were displaced, according to Amnesty International.
In the span of six months, Boko Haram has already claimed over 1,000 lives.
The Department of State Services (DSS) said that they have arrested 20 leaders of Boko Haram. The accused are commanders and frontliners of the militant group, and hail from different regions of the country.
Security forces comprising different nationalities have pushed back Boko Haram from at least 25 towns in the north-eastern region of the country where the extremist group claims dominance.
However, following these measures, Boko Haram has started infiltrating into the city of Lagos, which was relatively free from the militant havoc in the past years.
Recently, government announced arresting 14 suspected Boko Haram leaders from Lagos, Abuja, and a few other cities across Nigeria. The arrested militants have confessed to suicide bombings, and hit-and-run attacks.
Last week, 10 members of Boko Haram were executed by firing squad in Chad, in connection with twin attacks on capital city N'Djamena.
