Hospital torched in breakaway Cameroon region

Armed men have set fire to a hospital in one of Cameroon's anglophone regions, where militants have launched a campaign to separate from the francophone-majority state, state TV said Thursday.

The hospital in Mamfe, in the Southwest Region, was set ablaze overnight "by suspected armed separatists," CRTV said.

A local administrative official, speaking to AFP on condition of anonymity, said "armed groups" started attacking members of the security forces deployed outside the hospital, and then set fire to the building.

"The 45 hospitalised patients were taken out and transferred to another hospital. There was no loss of human life," the official said.

A doctor at Mamfe hospital said, "there was gunfire near the hospital and then the building caught fire and everything was destroyed."

The Southwest and neighbouring Northwest Region are in the grip of a nearly five-year-old conflict triggered by the separatists' declaration of the "Federal Republic of Ambazonia," an entity that is not recognised internationally.

The authorities have responded with a crackdown, and watchdogs say both sides have committed abuses.

The International Crisis Group (ICG) think tank estimates that the conflict has killed 6,000 people, mostly civilians, and forced more than one million people to flee their homes.

The hospital attack is the latest in a string of violent incidents in the two regions.

On June 1, soldiers killed nine civilians including a baby in the Northwest Region, according to the defence ministry, which expressed deep regret for actions that it said were "inappropriate" and "manifestly disproportionate."

On Tuesday, five gendarmes were killed by suspected separatists in Njitapon in the West Region, around a dozen kilometres (eight miles) from the Northwest Region, according to the local MP.

In May 2020, Mamfe's anglophone mayor, Ashu Priestley Ojong, was killed by separatists.