Strapped with a suicide bomb and sent to kill as many people as possible, the young Nigerian teenage girl tore off the explosive vest and fled as soon as she was out of sight of her Boko Haram handlers.
Her two companions, however, completed their grisly mission and walked into a crowd of hundreds at Dikwa refugee camp in northeast Nigeria and blew themselves up, killing 58 people,
The Associated Press reported out of Abuja.
Later found by local self-defense forces, the girl's tearful account is one of the first indications that at least some of the child bombers used by Boko Haram are aware that they are about to die and kill others.
"She said she was scared because she knew she would kill people, but she was also frightened of going against the instructions of the men who brought her to the camp," said Modu Awami, a self-defense fighter who helped question the girl.
Her story was corroborated when she led soldiers to the unexploded vest, Awami said Thursday by phone from the refugee camp, which holds 50,000 people who have fled Boko Haram's Islamic uprising.
The girl is in custody and has given officials information about other planned bombings that has helped them increase security at the camp, Satomi Ahmed, chairman of the Borno State Emergency Management Agency, told reporters.
Awami said he had no information about how the girl came to be with Boko Haram. The extremists have kidnapped thousands of people and there are fears they may be turning their captives into weapons.
An army bomb disposal expert has told the AP that some suicide bombs are detonated remotely, so the carriers may not have control over when the bomb goes off.
Even two days later, it's difficult to say exactly how many people died at Dikwa because there were corpses and body parts everywhere, including in the cooking pots, Awami said.
"Women, children, men and aged persons all died," he said by telephone. "I cannot say the exact number as some cannot be counted because the bodies were all mangled."
The latest atrocity blamed on Boko Haram extremists was committed on people who had been driven from the homes by the insurgents and had spent a year across the border in Cameroon.
They had only returned to Nigeria in January when soldiers declared the area safe. The scene of the killings is about 30 miles from the border with Cameroon and 53 miles northeast of Maiduguri, the biggest city in the northeast and birthplace of Boko Haram.
Such attacks make it difficult for the government to persuade people to return to their home areas, especially as there is nothing left for them. The extremists have razed homes and businesses, destroyed wells and boreholes, stolen livestock and seed grains that farmers need to start life again.
Boko Haram's 6-year-old Islamic insurgency has killed 20,000 people, made 2.5 million homeless and spread across Nigeria's borders.
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