POTISKUM, Nigeria (AP) — Assailants in northeastern Nigeria have killed three North Korean doctors, beheading one of them, officials said Sunday.
The attack on Saturday night in Potiskum, a town in Yobe State, comes after gunmen killed at least nine women who were administering polio vaccines in Kano, the major city in Nigeria’s predominantly Muslim north.
The assailants apparently killed the North Korean doctors inside their home, said Dr. Mohammed Mamman, chairman of the Hospital Managing Board of Yobe State.
The North Korean doctors had no security guards at their residence and typically traveled around the city without a police escort, officials said.
All three bodies had what appeared to be machete wounds.
Two of the men had their throats slit. The assailants beheaded the other doctor.
The doctors lived in a quiet neighborhood in the town. There was no room to house them at the hospital, where they would have had some protection, Dr. Mamman said.
Initially, doctors at the hospital who worked with the three men identified them as being from South Korea, while the police said they were from China.
But Dr. Mamman said that the three men were from North Korea and had lived in the state since 2005 as part of a medical program between Yobe State and the North Korean government.
More than a dozen other North Korean doctors work in the state under the program, which also includes engineers, Dr. Mamman said.
He said all the North Koreans would receive immediate protection from the security forces.
“It is very unfortunate,” he said of the killings.
The Yobe State police commissioner, Sanusi Rufai, confirmed that the attack took place and said that officers had begun an investigation.
Mr. Rufai said the police had already arrested 10 people, though the police in Nigeria routinely round up those living around the site of a crime, whether or not there is any evidence suggesting their complicity.
North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency did not immediately report the three doctors’ deaths on Sunday.
No one claimed responsibility for the attack, though suspicion fell on the Islamist sect Boko Haram. Members of the sect, whose name means “Western education is sacrilege,” have been attacking government buildings and security forces over the past year and a half.
In 2012 alone, the group was blamed for killing at least 792 people.
3 North Korean Doctors Are Killed in Nigeria
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3 North Korean Doctors Are Killed in Nigeria
