Tuesday, December 27, 2016

Suicide Bomber Attacks Market in Nigeria
December 27, 2016

MAIDUGURI/LAGOS. — A suicide bomber attacked a cattle market yesterday in Maiduguri in north-eastern Nigeria, the city worst hit in the seven-year insurgency waged by Islamist militant group Boko Haram.The police said the female bomber, who struck the Kasuwan Shanu market in the central district of Kasuwa was the only person killed in the blast at about 8.40am.

In a statement, police said a second woman who had a bomb was “lynched by an irate mob in the vicinity”. Security forces later detonated her device.

Nobody has claimed responsibility for the attack, but it bears the hallmarks of Boko Haram and comes days after president Muhammadu Buhari said the jihadist group’s key camp in its last remaining enclave had fallen.

President Buhari said the fall of the camp in the group’s Sambisa forest base after an offensive by Nigeria’s army in the former colonial game reserve marked the “final crushing of Boko Haram”.

Despite having been pushed back to the forest by the army in recent months, the group still stages bombings in the northeast and in neighbouring Niger and Cameroon.

A suspected Boko Haram suicide bomber killed two people in Cameroon on Sunday.

The Islamist militant group has killed 15 000 people and displaced more than two million during a seven-year insurgency to create an Islamic state governed by a harsh interpretation of sharia law in the northeast of Africa’s most populous nation.

In a separate development, two people were killed when part of a two-storey building in a police training college collapsed in Nigeria’s commercial capital Lagos on Christmas Day, the police and the emergency agency said.

The collapse happened in the densely populated Ikeja district of the city, an official from the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) said.

“Two people lost their lives. Nobody is inside the rubble,” said Dolapo Badmus, a spokesman for Lagos state police. Both he and the NEMA official said the search for other people was over.

Building collapses are frequent in Nigeria and often blamed by officials on the use of cheap materials.

On December 11, more than 100 people were killed when a church collapsed.

— Reuters/HR.

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