Pirates kill ship captain, engineer

“Armed pirates chased and fired upon a drifting bulk carrier. Vessel raised alarm and headed towards Lagos. All crew except the bridge team took shelter in the citadel. Due to the continuous firing the captain and the chief engineer were shot,” a notice on the IMB website said.
The attack, about 110 miles south of the commercial hub and main Nigerian port Lagos, comes two days after pirates on two boats in the same stretch of water fired shots at a different cargo vessel and chased it for 25 minutes before giving up, the website said.
Pirates off the coast of Nigeria tend to raid ships for cash and cargo rather than hijacking the crews for ransom like their counterparts off the coast of Somalia.
The frequency of attacks, while not as high as off the Somali coast or surrounding Indian Ocean, is on the rise.
Meanwhile, Nigerian security forces stopped a bomber yesterday who tried to ram a car packed with explosives through the gates of government house in the northern city of Kaduna, a government official said.
The bomber tried to flee and was shot in the legs, Reuben Buhari, spokesman for the governor, told Reuters. He said medical workers were treating him in police custody.
Islamist militant group Boko Haram has killed more than 250 people this year in bomb and gun attacks across the north of Africa’s most populous nation. It mostly targets the police and other authority figures.
A soldier who witnessed the attempted strike, asking not to be named, told Reuters that the driver of the car was a government worker.
President Goodluck Jonathan has said Boko Haram has infiltrated parts of government and the security services.
In other developments hurricane-strength winds and rain tore through the islands of Nigeria’s commercial capital yesterday, killing at least one person and downing trees across major roadways.
The storm brought torrential rains through Ikoyi, Lagos and Victoria islands, the centres of commerce and home to diplomats and the country’s elite in the city of Lagos. Tall palm trees bent in the wind, some snapping into homes and streets while fronds were blasted away.
On Ikoyi, an Associated Press journalist saw the corpse of one man at a busy transportation hub close to the nation’s former presidential palace. The man, identified as a local maths teacher coming to work, apparently died when a fixed antennae tore away from its moorings and struck him in the head.
Nearby, the wind had torn down an overhead highway road sign, smashing it into a passing sedan and injuring the driver and a passenger as the roof collapsed around them, witnesses said.
The storm snarled the morning commute throughout Lagos, a city of 15 million residents regularly in the grips of a traffic jam.
Yusuf Shuaib, a spokesman for Nigeria’s National Emergency Management Agency, declined to immediately comment.
Winds from the storm reached about 74 miles an hour, the threshold for hurricane wind speeds, said Mary Iso, the meteorological manager of Lagos’ Murtala Muhammed International Airport. Further inland, winds reached up to 40 miles an hour, she said.
About 2/3 of an inch of water fell during the storm, which lasted about 15 minutes, Iso said. The Nigerian Meteorological Agency had previously issued warnings about the possibility of a storm coming through as the seasons begin to change in the nation, Iso said. Nigeria remains gripped by Harmattan winds, which carry sand from the Sahara Desert over Africa’s most populous nation. The country’s rainy season typically begins in several weeks. – Reuters/AP.