News from Nianyaoihun village in Kailahun District indicates that a Bufallo attacked two people on Monday, 15th July 2013 and that it spoke to one of its victims in the Mende language that it was in the bush to kill somebody. The victims are currently being admitted at the Nixon Memorial Hospital in Segbwema.
The animal is reported to have attacked its first victim, Bockarie Gbadawa, while he was brushing his cocoa farm. Bockarie told this reporter that he was suddenly attacked by the animal and was chased by it for some twenty minutes when it later closed on him and hit him twice in the leg and waist with its horns. He sustained serious injuries in the leg and waist.
The second victim, Brima Morison, a JSS II pupil of the Provincial Islamic Secondary School at Jojoima to whom the animal reportedly spoke in Mende that it was out to kill somebody, suffered multiple injuries resulting from the buffalo’s attack.
Brima explained that he and a couple of his friends were returning home from collecting fire wood when one of his friends shouted that he has seen a duiker (freetambo). He said he dropped the load on his head and rushed to the direction his friend has pointed only for him to see a buffalo.
He said he shouted to inform his friends that it was a buffalo not a duiker. He said the animal first mooed and then spoke to him in Mende that it was out to kill somebody.
“No sooner I heard the words from the animal did I realize that a human being may have turned into the buffalo to cause mischief,” Brima said, and according to him, he quickly recited a verse from the Holy Quran as the rushed at him with its horns.
He explained that the animal hit him in the leg and fell and attempted to pierce its horns into his stomach but that he was strong to hold on to the horns and dragged under the animal and he too held on to the animal’s scrotum.
While all of these were unfolding, Brima explained, he was shouting to his friends for help as all of them had climbed into the safety of the tree around their macabre battle ground.
He said that one of his friends, Amara Vandi shouted back that he was going to town to call people. Brima maintained that he continued holding on to the animal’s scrotum as they struggled into the thick bush.
But according to Brima while this was going on, he felt a human hand forcing his own hands off the animal’s scrotum and that when he subsequently released the animal, it did not turn to revenge, but strolled into the thick bush.
At the hospital, Brima’s father said it is strange for a bush animal to just attack a human being. “They will usually run away when they see a person,” Pa Brima stated, but that whenever such an animal attacks a human being who had not done anything harmful to it, human beings have something to do with it through witchcraft, the old man maintained.
“I am very sure somebody had transformed into the buffalo to cause mischief but had missed its target,” Pa Brima said.
By Saffa Moriba
July 26, 2013
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