Nigerian airstrike kills dozens in refugee camp

A Nigerian airstrike meant for Boko Haram militants has killed at least 52 people and injured dozens more in a refugee camp.

The strike hit Rann in Borno state - a stronghold for the jihadist group - with charity workers from Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) among the dead and injured.

Nigerian general Lucky Irabor said it was too early to determine the cause of the incident.

MSF said as many as 200 people had been wounded in the bombing while an ICRC spokeswoman said six Nigeria Red Cross members were killed and 13 injured.

Photographs of the carnage showed a man in bloodstained clothes carrying a wounded child, as well as bloodied victims being treated on the ground outside a tent clinic overflowing with the wounded.

Nearby, corpses lay covered by blankets and prayer mats, alongside mounds of hastily dug graves.

Robert Hugues, head of emergency programmes for MSF, said: "It is total chaos there, the team is completely overwhelmed with more than 200 people wounded.

"So they are trying to stabilise the patients that need the most acute care, and right now it is night there, so the team is trying to find a solution to stabilise these people during the night.

"It is very complex because the place is very insecure, so it will be probably a mix of air evacuation and also road evacuation, so we hope that during the night not many people will die because we don't have there the capability to properly stabilise people."

The airstrike came amid an offensive by the Nigerian military against Boko Haram, which has been going on for weeks.

A spokesman for President Muhammadu Buhari said in a statement: "The president pledges federal help for the state government in attending to this regrettable operational mistake."

President Buhari's office said the bombing - coming several weeks after the military claimed to have taken control of a key camp in the jihadists' Sambisa forest base - happened during the "final phase of mopping up insurgents in the northeast".

Boko Haram has stepped up attacks in recent weeks as the end of the rainy season has enabled its fighters to move more easily in the bush.

Villagers have previously reported civilian casualties in airstrikes on Boko Haram positions in the region.

Some of the schoolgirls kidnapped by the insurgents in 2014 and freed last year said three of their classmates had been killed by airstrikes.

Of the nearly 300 schoolgirls who were abducted, 196 remain missing.

Boko Haram's seven-year-old uprising has killed more than 20,000 people and forced 2.6 million from their homes.