Four young people were killed when Cameroon government army soldiers opened fire at Meta Quarters, a key site in Bamenda, witnesses said, as the Biya Francophone government sought to end the crisis in Southern Cameroons.

Several witnesses, gathered along the main road in the neighborhood, said that pickup trucks arrived shortly after 2:00 pm on Saturday, January 23, 2021 and soldiers began to fire tear gas and then bullets. It wasn’t immediately clear how many people had been killed, but each of the witnesses said they saw four bodies on the road.

Cameroon Intelligence Report gathered that three of the four victims, Ngalim Alucious, Ntakah Nelly Mbah, and Sale Sadam reportedly came from Old Town to visit family relations while the fourth, Brian, was a Meta Quarters resident.

We understand the army revealed in a statement that soldiers found the teenagers smoking weed in an uncompleted building.

“The government in Yaoundé has sent the army to come and kill us and our children and grand children,” said an 86-year-old woman.

The North West governor’s office referred questions about the killings to the police commissioner in Bamenda, who couldn’t be immediately reached for comment.

The constant killing of civilians in Southern Cameroons and the decision to use military force to quell the Ambazonia uprising has moved politics in the two Cameroons into an uncertain phase.

On Thursday, May 28, 2020, the Cameroon government military conducted an offensive raid around the neighborhood of Upper Bunduma, Buea, which led to the killing of four unarmed young men, according to the Centre for Human Rights and Democracy in Africa, CHRDA.

The people of Bakweri Town, Sandpit area in Buea, on Monday, July 30, 2018, experienced one of their greatest horrors when masked elements of the Rapid Intervention Battalion (BIR) moved into Bakweri Town and massacred youths, took some away several teenagers and executed them in neighboring Muea.

On September 27, 2018, Cameroon government soldiers arrested six young men around Babouti quarters in Buea Town in the early hours of the morning before shooting them dead. A stray bullet caught a seventh person, an elderly man who gave up the ghost.

By Fon Lawrence with files