Boko Haram gunmen on Sunday opened fire in a college dormitory in northeast Nigeria as the students slept, killing 40, in the latest massacre blamed on the Islamist insurgents.
All of the dead were students of the College of Agriculture in the town of Gujba in Yobe state, the area governor said in a statement.
The early morning attack was carried out by "Boko Haram terrorists who went into the school and opened fire on students" while they were sleeping, the military spokesman in Yobe, Lazarus Eli, told AFP.
Salamanu Ibrahim, a 23-year-old student at the college, said dozens of gunmen took part in the killing, bursting into dorm rooms and firing indiscriminately in the dark.
"The attackers went berserk," he told AFP in Yobe's capital Damaturu, some 30 kilometres (18 miles) away, where he fled along with hundreds of other students.
"They were fully armed with sophisticated rifles, and improvised explosives," and razed several college buildings after leaving the dorms, he said.
The office of Yobe Governor Ibrahim Gaidam put the death toll at 40, with four others injured.
In a previously scheduled television interview, President Goodluck Jonathan said he instructed Nigeria's security chiefs "to look at different ways of handling" the insurgency hours after learning of the latest bloodshed.
He also voiced exasperation at the targeting of students in the interview broadcast on several networks, saying: "Why did they kill them? ... You can ask and ask."
The European Union's foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton called the slaughter "horrific".
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