Boko Haram crisis: Nigeria's Baga town hit by new assault

Musa Alhaji Bukar, a senior government official in the area, said that fleeing residents told him that Baga, which had a population of about 10,000, was now "virtually non-existent".

Those who fled reported that they had been unable to bury the dead, and corpses littered the town's streets, he said.

While he raised fears that some 2,000 had been killed in the raids, other reports put the number in the hundreds.