MAIDUGURI, Feb 13 (agencies): At least 21 people were killed in two separate Boko Haram attacks on villages near the key city of Maiduguri in northeast Nigeria, a community leader and a witness said on Friday.
"They (Boko Haram) killed 12 people in Akida village and nine others in Mbuta village during a raid," said community leader Mustapha Abbagini. Nigerian Boko Haram militants have carried out an attack on Chad overnight, the first such assault on Chadian soil, officials say.
Fighters crossed Lake Chad in four motorboats and attacked a village, an army spokesman told the BBC.
The Islamist militants were pushed back by Chadian troops after killing several people, residents said.
Chad recently joined Nigeria, Niger, and Cameroon in a military coalition against Boko Haram.
The jihadists, who want to create their own Islamic caliphate in Nigeria, have killed thousands and forced millions to flee their homes in north-eastern Nigeria since 2009.
Colonel Azem Bermandoua Agouna, of the Chadian military, told the BBC's Thomas Fessy that the militants had killed one soldier and wounded a further four in the village of Ngouboua.
Mr Agouna said a local chief was killed during the attack by a stray bullet. He did not confirm reports of other civilian casualties.
A witness to the attack in Mbuta gave the same death toll while both said that the insurgents destroyed shops and homes in the raids, which happened on Thursday morning.
The two attacks came before a female suicide bomber blew herself up at a crowded market in the town of Biu, in the south of Borno state, of which Maiduguri is the capital.
A civilian vigilante helping the Nigerian Army in the counter-insurgency and a source at the town's hospital both said that the death toll had risen from seven to 11 after the blast.
"Four more people, all of them adults, died at the hospital here in Biu while receiving treatment," said the vigilante, Abor Kabiru.
