Cameroon President Paul Biya agreed with his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, that an impartial probe was needed after gunmen killed 22 people in a village at the heart of a separatist insurgency last month, the French presidency said.
The leaders spoke telephonically about the February 14 attack on a village in western Cameroon, where gunmen in military uniforms and masks shot women and children and burned others in their homes.
“They agreed an impartial probe was needed in reaction to violence against civilians in Ngarbuh in the north-western province,” the French presidency said in a statement.
Cameroon’s army has been fighting English-speaking militias seeking to form a breakaway state called Ambazonia amid the cocoa farms and forests of west Cameroon since 2017.
As fighting intensifies abuses by both sides have also increased, witnesses and rights groups say.
The fighting is the gravest threat to stability in the oil- and cocoa-producing country since Biya took power nearly 40 years ago.
