Nigeria: Boko Haram Muslim terrorists made schoolchildren strip naked, then shot them dead execution style

MAMUDO, Nigeria (Reuters) - They crept up to the school under cover of darkness, armed with petrol and automatic weapons.

Most of the teachers and pupils had fled, but some students, one teacher and headmaster Adanu Haruna were still in the compound, one of many rural boarding schools in Nigeria surrounded by forest and farmland.

"They made the students line up and strip naked, then they made the ones with pubic hair lie face down on the ground," Haruna said, eyes wide with horror at describing the attack on the iron-roofed school built by British colonizers in the 1950s.

"They shot them point blank then set the bodies on fire."

The Mamudo government school, charred and smelling of scorched blood after 22 students and a teacher were killed there in the July 6 attack near Potiskum in Nigeria's northeast, was the fourth to be targeted by suspected Boko Haram militants in less than a month.

The attacks reveal much about the rebels who are fighting to revive a medieval Islamic caliphate in northern Nigeria, the type of state they are seeking to establish and the impact of their efforts to do so on the African economic powerhouse.

In a video uploaded to the Internet on Saturday, Boko Haram's purported leader Abubakar Shekau denied ordering the latest killings, saying Boko Haram does not itself kill small children, but he praised attacks on Western schools.

"We fully support the attack on school in Mamudo, as well as on other schools," he said. "Western education schools are against Islam ... We will kill their teachers."

Boko Haram, a nickname which translates roughly as "Western education is sinful", formed around a decade ago as a clerical movement opposed to Western influence, which the sect's founder, Mohammed Yusuf, said was poisoning young minds against Islam.

Yet security forces and politicians were the main targets of the armed revolt it started after Yusuf's killing in a 2009 military crackdown that left 800 people dead.

Since those days Boko Haram has splintered into several factions, including some with ties to al Qaeda's Saharan wing, which analysts say operate more or less independently, despite Shekau's loose claim to authority over them.

Before June, there had been only a handful of attacks on the Western-style schools it so despises.

An offensive against the insurgents since President Goodluck Jonathan declared a state of emergency in three remote northern states in May, wresting control of the far northeast from Boko Haram and pushing its fighters into hiding, has changed that.

Across northeastern Nigeria, schools are emptying out, threatening further radicalization and economic decline in a region left behind by the country's oil-rich Christian south.

Nassir Salaudeen, a teacher whose son was killed in a strike on Damaturu government school on June 16, the first of the wave of recent attacks, said he had put all his efforts into his boy's education in the hope he would get a good job.

"They killed him in cold blood, just because he was a student and his father a teacher," a tearful Salaudeen said. "I regret ever being educated."

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