Nigeria Violence: Scores Dead After Kano Blasts

Nigeria Violence: Scores Dead After Kano Blasts
ICC Note
The Boko Haram has continued its killings in northern Nigeria. The group targests Christians and security officials. In this latest attack, the police stations were among the targets.
01/21/2012 Nigeria (BBC News)-Eyewitnesses in the northern Nigerian city of Kano say they have counted scores of bodies after co-ordinated bomb attacks on Friday.
A 24-hour curfew is in place in the city. Police have confirmed seven deaths in various locations.
Police stations and the state police HQ were among the targets, and gunfire was heard across the second biggest city.
The militant Islamist group Boko Haram, whose name means “Western education is forbidden”, said it was responsible.
The group has been behind a recent campaign of violence in the mainly Muslim north.
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Nervous crowds
In a statement, police said “seven casualties have been confirmed from different locations of the attacks” in Kano, but the official death toll looked certain to rise.
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A BBC reporter in Kano said he had been to the main hospital’s mortuary and seen 150 bodies.
The police statement said four police stations around the city, the headquarters of the State Security Service (SSS), as well as passport and immigration offices were targeted.
The BBC’s Mark Doyle, in Kano, says he has seen one police station with its roof completely burnt off, though it was not clear whether this was caused directly by an explosion or by fire.
The atmosphere there is nervous, and a large crowd outside the police station quickly dispersed when soldiers arrived, our correspondent adds.
He says this is Boko Haram’s most serious attack on the police and is deeply embarrassing for the authorities.
The curfew would be in place in Kano until further notice, officials said.
The wounded were reported to include foreigners from an area near the SSS headquarters, where many expatriates – particularly Lebanese and Indians – live.
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Witnesses said the bomber who attacked one of the police stations pulled up outside the building on a motorbike, dismounted and ran inside holding a bag.
Nigeria’s Channels TV said one of its reporters, Enenche Akogwu, had been killed in the attacks.
It said he had been “shot by unknown gunmen suspected to be members of the Boko Haram sect”, outside the state government house.
‘Largest assault’
Boko Haram later claimed responsibility for the attacks.
A spokesman for the group, Abul Qaqa, told journalists in the north-eastern city of Maiduguri, the group’s base, that it had carried out the attacks because the authorities had refused to release group members arrested in Kano.
The group wants to establish Islamic law in Nigeria. It started to stage drive-by shootings in 2010 on government targets in Maiduguri.
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In recent weeks, southerners, who are mostly Christians or animists, living in the north have been the targets of deadly attacks.
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