Women who have fled violence in Nigeria queue for food at a refugee welcoming center in Ngouboua, Chad, January 19, 2015. REUTERS/Emmanuel Braun

By Misha Hussain

DAKAR (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - The Niger government has lifted a ban on refugee camps in the south of the country as record numbers flee Boko Haram attacks in neighbouring Nigeria.

The government had banned the camps fearing Boko Haram fighters might use them as bases to launch attacks in Niger and Nigeria as part of their drive to carve out an Islamic caliphate.

But a Niger government official said communities in Niger's Diffa region had been overwhelmed by new arrivals, prompting the government to reverse the two-year-old policy, a move welcomed by the United Nations.

"We hoped the displacement would stop, but people continue to arrive, and our villages and towns can no longer absorb the masses of people coming," Hassane Ardo Ido, general-secretary of Diffa province, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

According to government figures, some 150,000 refugees as well as returning Niger migrants are seeking shelter amongst locals in Diffa, an impoverished region recovering from drought.

The shift in policy follows months of lobbying by the United Nations' refugee agency (UNHCR), which argued that the camps could provide protection, shelter and food for the refugees without burdening the host population.

Karl Steinacker, UNHCR's country director in Niger, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by telephone from Niamey the country had never seen this many Nigerian refugees before.

UNHCR had opened one camp in Sayam Forage, 25 km (15 miles)north of Diffa, and was constructing another in Kablewa, further north. But convincing refugees to relocate was proving difficult, he said.

"Only 600 have been moved into the camp since it opened on Dec. 30," said Steinacker.

Niger launched a $36 million emergency plan to cater for the refugees earlier this month and has asked for international humanitarian assistance.

Boko Haram has killed thousands in a five-year rebellion. The number and scale of militant attacks have risen sharply since May 2013 when President Goodluck Jonathan imposed emergency rule in Nigeria's three worst-hit northern states bordering Niger.

Antonio Avella, deputy country director for the World Food Programme (WFP) in Niger said the organisation had to reallocate funds from other programmes to deal with the Nigeria crisis in 2014 and was struggling to secure funds for 2015.

In October 2014 Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon agreed in Niamey to coordinate a military response to the fight against Boko Haram, but the deal is all but dead, according to sources at the United Nations.

Baga Sola (Chad) (AFP) - 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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A Nigerian refugee child carries wood in a United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) refugee camp in Bag …

- 'A terrible loneliness' -

Pastor Yacubu Moussa, 43, is one of the very few Christians to have escaped the attack on Baga. The town was asleep when Boko Haram arrived on the night of January 3.

"They started firing at everyone indiscriminately -- men, women, little children, even the old," he said.

Asked how many fighters had attacked the town, he hesitated and talked of "thousands of men", a number that is impossible to verify. But the pastor is sure about one thing: "There were bodies everywhere in the streets" when he fled for his life.

Ten days later, he tried to go home to get some of his possessions. Hiding in the bush, he saw "bodies floating on the water" of the lake. "The smell was so strong it stank from very far away."

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Nigerian refugee women cook in a United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) refugee camp in Baga Sola by …

He confirmed that there is not much left of Baga. "They burned everything, our houses, ours shops, even the motorbikes."

It's at Muslim prayer times when the terrible loneliness of being almost the sole Christian survivor of the massacres hits home, as his neighbours in the camp kneel to face Mecca. "Here I have nothing to do. I don't have a congregation left, I have no place of worship, not even a Bible."

Since the beginning of January more than 14,000 people have fled over the Nigerian border into Chad to escape the bloody attacks around Baga, according to Mamadou Dian Balde, of the UN's refugee agency.

According to international rights groups, Boko Haram razed the town and slaughtered hundreds of people, if not more.

- 'Stories too hard to hear' -

"They arrive with stories that are too hard to listen to," said refugee worker Idriss Dezeh of the survivors. "The other day a man arrived to be registered but he didn't seem to hear anything I was saying to him. Then he started to cry. Boko Haram threw a grenade into his house, killing his wife and his three children."

Some though were lucky enough to get out alive with their children. Sitting in front of a white tent in the refugee camp in Baga Sola, Aisha Aladji Garb breastfeeds her tiny baby. Two weeks ago she gave birth to the baby boy in a canoe after fleeing Boko Haram.

She was found by a patrol of Chadian troops after reaching their side of the lake. "They took care of me and carried me onto their truck and took me to the camp where I got help.

"It is thanks to them that my baby is alive," she said with a proud smile. "That's why I have called him Idriss Deby" after the president of Chad.

The U.S. government on Monday announced criminal charges against three men who are accused of conspiring to gather economic intelligence on behalf of Russia, including information about U.S. sanctions against the country.

Prosecutors said Evgeny Buryakov, Igor Sporyshev and Victor Podobnyy were trying to recruit New York City residents as intelligence sources.

Russia's foreign ministry dismissed the claims and said the United States had not provided any evidence to support the allegations against Buryakov and two other men.

"One gets the impression that the U.S. government has decided to use a favored practice of unleashing passions over espionage," the spokesman, Alexander Lukashevich, said in a statement, demanding the release of Buryakov.

The investigation, which follows the 2010 expulsion of several Russians as spies from the United States and an eventual spy swap, comes with ties between Russia and the United States at their worst since the Cold War over the conflict in Ukraine.

Washington has already imposed several rounds of sanctions on Russia for annexing the Crimea peninsula from Ukraine in 2014 and backing pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine, targeting Russian financial and energy companies.

"Russian-American ties are going through an extremely complicated period due to Washington's hostilities," said Lukashevich.

Monday's charges stem from Buryakov's alleged covert work on behalf of Russia's foreign intelligence service, the SVR, according to a criminal complaint.

Buryakov, 39, masked this work by posing as a banker for Russia's Vnesheconombank, according to the complaint and the bank's website.

(Reporting by Polina Devitt; Editing by Thomas Grove, Larry King)