20 Boko Haram members shot dead

Twenty suspected Boko Haram militants in Maiduguri,have been killed by Nigerian soldiers in a shootout.

But the army lost one soldier while two others were injured, a senior officer said.

“We got a report that some suspected members of Boko Haram were meeting at a particular location in Maiduguri. Our men mobilised, leading to a shootout. Twenty suspected terrorists were killed while a soldier died in the operation and two others sustained injuries,” commander Victor Ebhaleme told the news agency, AFP.

He said no arrests were made during the raid on the hideout in the Gwaidamgari area of Maiduguri, a hotbed of Boko Haram activity.

The spokesman of the sect, Abu Qaqa has however denied that its fighters were killed in the raid.

He told a teleconference for journalists in Maiduguri, capital of Borno State and the sect’s heartland, that his fighters had not been meeting at the place where the military said it killed them.

“They only succeeded in killing civilians,” Qaqa said. “Twenty of us cannot risk sitting in a volatile place to hold a meeting … It is not possible.”

The deadly Boko Haram group is responsible for deadly gun and bomb attacks in some parts of Nigeria, particularly in the north-east, the north central and the capital Abuja, which have claimed more than 1,400 lives since mid-2009.