Lying on his side, Moussa Zira shows the gaping wound where the bullet entered his thigh the night Boko Haram came to his village near the now devastated northern Nigerian town of Baga.

He pretended to be dead before escaping in a dug-out canoe across Lake Chad to a refugee camp. He is still in terrible pain and has a limp, but Moussa Zira knows it is a miracle he survived what many fear was the worst massacre of the Islamists’ bloody insurgency. “Boko Haram arrived at four in the morning and entered every hut, looking for the men. They greeted us and told us to follow them into the bush, where they would explain everything,” he said.

The fighters took 14 men — “one per house” — from his village near Baga. “There was an old man with us and they told him to leave. We walked to a field and they told everyone to lie face down on the ground.

“After firing in the air once, they started shooting us” at point-blank range. Moussa Zira thought it was all over, that he was dead. “Then I realised that the bullet had missed my head and had gone through my arm and the back of my thigh. But around me everyone was dead.”

He lay still among the bodies so that the fighters “would not finish me off” until the gunmen left, before crawling through the tall grass for hours before coming across a motorcyclist who helped him get to the lake and away to Chad.

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