KANO – Gun and bomb attacks by Islamist insurgents in the northern Nigerian city of Kano last week killed at least 178 people, a hospital doctor said yesterday, underscoring the daunting challenge Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan faces to prevent his country sliding further into chaos.
A co-ordinated series of bomb blasts and shooting sprees mostly targeting police stations on Friday sent panicked residents of Nigeria’s second-biggest city of more than 10 million people running for cover.
The scale of the carnage makes this by far the deadliest strike claimed by Boko Haram, a shadowy Islamist sect that started out as a clerical movement opposed to western education but has become the biggest security menace facing Africa’s top oil producer.
“We have 178 people killed in the two main hospitals,” the senior doctor in Kano’s Murtala Mohammed hospital said following Friday’s attacks, citing records from his own and the other main hospital of Nasarawa.
“There could be more, because some bodies have not yet come in and others were collected early.”
The streets were quiet yesterday in Kano, a vast metropolis of wide paved highways, normally buzzing with motorbikes.
Churches, which would usually be filled with worshippers on Sunday in the religiously mixed city, were largely empty.
Boko Haram has been blamed for killing hundreds of people in increasingly sophisticated bombings and shootings, mostly targeting security forces, establishment figures and more recently Christians, in a country of 160 million people split roughly evenly between them and Muslims.
Apart from a handful of forays into the capital, Abuja, the sect’s energies have been concentrated in the majority Muslim north, far from the oil-producing facilities along the southern coast that keep Africa’s second-biggest economy afloat.
A further 10 people were killed yesterday in Bauchi state, which borders Kano, when police tackled gunmen attempting to rob a bank, the police said. Boko Haram robbed several banks last year to fund its insurgency.
“In the early hours of today gunmen killed 10 people at a military checkpoint and a nearby hotel at Tafawa Balewa local government area,” said police commissioner Ikechukwu Aduba.
“One police officer, an army corporal and eight civilians [were killed] after gunmen were earlier repelled from robbing a bank.”
Explosions also struck two churches in Bauchi yesterday, witnesses said, destroying one of them completely, although there were no immediate reports of casualties.
The government has announced a dusk-to-dawn curfew in Kano, an ancient city that was once part of an Islamic caliphate trading riches on caravan routes connecting sub-Saharan Africa with the Mediterranean. – (Reuters)