5,000 Nigerians flee after bandit evacuation order

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More than 5,000 residents from more than a dozen rural communities in Nigeria's northwestern Sokoto state have fled their homes after a criminal kingpin ordered they leave, a lawmaker and residents told AFP Monday.

The bandits killed at least 12 people to force residents to leave, Habibu Halilu Modachi, a local lawmaker, told AFP, warning the death toll and number of displaced could increase as reports were still coming in.

"Between Saturday and Sunday, over 5,000 people have been forced out of their homes in Bafarawa and several nearby communities as a result of threats of attack from Bello Turji," a notorious bandit leader in the region, said Modachi.

"Turji sent his men to these communities and asked them to leave by Sunday afternoon or risk being killed."

Residents of several villages in Isa district near the border with Niger fled their homes on Saturday through Sunday following threats of attacks by criminal gangs who ordered them to leave on Turji's orders, the sources said.

Heavily armed criminal gangs referred to as bandits by locals have been raiding villages, killing victims and abducting people for ransom.

The increasing cooperation between criminal gangs motivated by financial gain and jihadists waging a 16-year-old armed insurrection for a caliphate in Nigeria's northeast has compounded the situation.