adminLagos – A double bomb attack that killed 31 people in a crowded market in the central Nigerian city of Jos was likely to have been carried out by Boko Haram, the state government said yesterday.
“It’s an extension of the terrorist acts that have been penetrating all states and cities,” Pam Ayuba, spokesman for the Plateau state governor Jonah Jang, said.
The blasts happened at about 6PM on Thursday at a makeshift market near the Terminus bus station, not far from the site of a previous attack in May that left at least 118 dead.
Boko Haram’s leader Abubakar Shekau later claimed the attack.
Ayuba said the Plateau state government had previously received intelligence about the possibility of a new attack by the militants and ruled out any political link to the violence.
Jos, which lies in the central “Middle Belt” where Nigeria’s mostly Muslim north meets its mainly Christian south, has been a flashpoint for years.
After the 2011 elections, widespread rioting left hundreds dead.
But Ayuba said that political party primaries for next year’s general elections had taken place in recent days and passed off “without any rancour”.
“Everything was peaceful, so politics is overruled. It’s a continuation of the wanton killing of the kind conducted by the terrorists,” he added, referring to the Islamist group.
Governor Jang has warned people in the city to be on their guard and appealed for calm.
A senior rescue official said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to talk to the media that 14 people were being treated for injuries at four separate hospitals in the city.
Meanwhile, Nigerian police arrested a 13-year-old girl wearing an explosives-packed vest in the northern city of Kano hours after an attack by two female suicide bombers, a security source and a witness said on Thursday.
The girl turned up at a clinic on the outskirts of Kano hours after a double bombing at a market in the city.
“The people there called the attention of security personnel who found explosives primed for a suicide attack on her,” said the security source, who requested anonymity, in an account confirmed by a nurse at the clinic.
In a related incident, Niger needs more international assistance to help it confront a looming food crisis compounded by an influx of refugees fleeing attacks by Boko Haram Islamist fighters in neighbouring Nigeria, the country’s prime minister said.
The twin crisis highlights the strain being put on Niger, a uranium producer straddling the Sahara that is one of the world’s poorest nations, by recurrent poor harvests and the spill over from its neighbour’s conflict with militants.
Niger’s southwestern Diffa region, which borders Nigeria’s violence-ravaged Borno State, has seen the arrival of more than 87,000 refugees since May of last year, Brigi Rafini said during a visit to the area on Wednesday. More than half are children.
The influx comes as a poor harvest in Diffa this year has left the majority of the region’s estimated 500,000 inhabitants facing food shortages. Nearly a quarter of all children are now suffering from acute malnutrition.
“The combination of these two shocks has put the displaced people and the local population in an extremely vulnerable situation, creating all the conditions for a food crisis,” Rafini said in a statement.
More than 25,000 refugee children also need schooling, but displaced Nigerians are living in classrooms in a number of locations, causing the closure of 35 schools, he added.
Agencies including the World Food Programme, the UN refugee agency and Unicef are already working in Diffa. But Rafini said more needed to be done and he called upon the people of Niger to do their part to help.
Nigeria’s Boko Haram militants have stepped up their attacks across much of the country’s north in the past year, raiding villages, kidnapping children and seizing territory for their declared caliphate. – AFP
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Bongani Ndlovu