A police officer is said to have been killed and five teachers abducted after armed individuals stormed a teacher training centre in the town of Wum, in Cameroon’s restive Northwest Region, according to accounts from local authorities.
The attack is reported to have taken place on Tuesday morning, when gunmen opened fire on the officer as he attempted to intervene, killing him instantly, before seizing the teachers and taking them to an unknown location. Regional governor Adolphe Lele Lafrique was quoted describing the assault, saying armed individuals “unleashed a hail of bullets” on the officer before abducting the group. The identities and current whereabouts of the abducted teachers had not been made public at the time of writing, and no group had claimed responsibility, though suspicion has fallen on separatist fighters active in the area.
Wum lies roughly 80 kilometres north of Bamenda, the regional capital, in one of two English-speaking regions of Cameroon where separatist forces have been fighting government troops for close to a decade. The conflict traces back to protests in 2016 against what demonstrators described as the marginalisation of anglophone communities within the country’s francophone-dominated legal and education systems, before escalating into an armed insurgency the following year. Rights monitors estimate that at least 6,000 people have died in the fighting since 2016, with hundreds of thousands displaced from their homes, including more than 330,000 uprooted in the past year alone.
Education has repeatedly been targeted in the conflict, with separatist leaders periodically calling for school boycotts or lockdowns to press their demands, and teachers and pupils among those most frequently caught up in attacks and abductions. The latest incident is likely to renew concern about the safety of schools and education staff in the Northwest and neighbouring Southwest regions, where years of instability have already disrupted schooling for large numbers of children. Cameroonian authorities have not yet indicated what steps are being taken to secure the release of the abducted teachers.