The people here spoke of a well-organized gang of dozens who stealthily surrounded the village before dawn. They had come on foot from the low hills surrounding this rocky plateau, Muslim herdsmen apparently bent on revenge for similar killings in January and angry over what one rights group said were cases of cattle rustling.
They crept around the stand of tall cactus that screens the village of about 2,000. Gunmen fired shots in the air, to panic the residents and flush them from their homes. “I heard a powerful gunshot, then sporadic shots from all angles,” recalled Isaac Pam, a civil servant who lives here. “The village had been surrounded. And the firing was coming closer.”
A separate corps — men with machetes, or “cutlasses” as some villagers described them — began their work. “I saw them with very long, white swords,” Mr. Pam said. “Some were dressed in black, and some in camouflage.” The men were ruthlessly efficient, and in halting sentences the villagers described the carnage that followed.
“They killed my daughter and my son,” Ezekiel Chwang said. “It was Sunday night. They surrounded our house. They were shouting.” He climbed into a tree to escape the marauders, and dropped back down after they had left, to find a horrific scene in his home. The men, he said, had discovered his 6-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son sleeping in the bedroom. They slit their necks with a machete, then set them on fire.
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