Two suicide bombers killed at least
31 people and injured 38 others in a crowded market in the northeast Nigeria
city of Yola after faking a fight, police said Friday.
The bombers with explosives strapped
to their bodies entered the Jimeta Main Market after sundown on Thursday and
“pretended to be fighting”, said area police spokesman Othman Abubakar.
The staged fight between the two men
“attracted the attention of people nearby to see what was happening,” he told
AFP.
“When people had gathered they
detonated their explosives… They killed a sizeable number of people,” he added.
The coordinator for the National
Emergency Management Agency in Yola, Sa’ad Bello, gave casualty figures of 31
dead and 38 injured.
There was no immediate claim of
responsibility but fingers will likely be pointed at Boko Haram, which has
carried out several attacks in the north of the state in recent weeks.
Yola has also suffered attacks, but
not in recent years. It had come to be seen as a relative safe haven for
hundreds of thousands of people forced to flee their homes further north
because of the violence.
The Yola attack came hours after a
suspected suicide bombing at a checkpoint outside a military barracks in
Maiduguri, the capital of neighbouring Borno state that killed four people.
0 comments:
Post a Comment