KADUNA, Nigeria: An explosion overnight in a brothel in the northeastern Nigerian city of Bauchi killed 11 people and wounded 28, police said yesterday, with suspicion likely to fall on the militant group Boko Haram.
The initial statement sent by text message said the cause of the blast was unknown. Boko Haram has targeted several cities across north and central Nigeria in a bombing campaign in the past few months, killing hundreds of people.
Police yesterday arrested one suspect in connection with the blast in the People’s Hotel brothel, Bauchi state police spokesman Haruna Mohammed said. He gave no further details.
A military operation in the northeast has so far failed to quell the rebellion and has triggered a string of reprisal attacks on officials and civilians. Boko Haram’s targets often include places it considers sinful.
The insurgents say they are fighting to carve an Islamic state out of religiously-mixed Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, biggest economy and leading energy producer.
Bauchi state, like neighbouring Jos, lies on Nigeria’s volatile “Middle Belt”, where its largely Christian south and Muslim north meet. The region has been less frequently attacked by Boko Haram than its heartland in the remote northeast.
But the militants seem keen to extend their reach beyond Borno state, where military operations against them have been focused. A bomb in an upmarket shopping district of the capital Abuja killed 21 people on Wednesday, the third attack on the capital in three months.
In Nigeria’s second-biggest city of Kano, the relic of a medieval Islamic caliphate, police acting on a tip-off said they had found and defused a bomb consisting of 13 cylinders of explosives next to the Jumat Praying Ground late on Friday.
“The high-grade explosives were loaded into a rickety red (Toyota) Starlet,” Kano police commissioner Alhaji Adenrele Shinaba told journalists at a news conference. “They were primed to explode on worshippers.”
Boko Haram often attacks mosques as well as churches, especially if they are seen as too moderate.
Reuters
