Girl suicide bomber, 10, kills 19 people
Print Edition
A bomb strapped to a girl aged around 10 years old exploded in a busy market place in the Nigerian city of Maiduguri on Saturday, killing at least 19 people and injuring more than 20.
“The explosive devices were wrapped around her body and the girl looked no more than 10 years old,” a police source said.
The blast hit the Monday Market in the Borno State capital, Maiduguri, when it was packed with shoppers and traders.
Hours later, a suspicious vehicle that had been stopped at a checkpoint outside the city of Potiskum, in neighboring Yobe, exploded at a police station as its driver was being taken in for questioning.
A police officer accompanying the car and the driver were killed, an officer said. Potiskum has been a repeated target for militant violence.
Both blasts came a week after a major Boko Haram attack on the fishing town of Baga in northern Borno State, which is believed to be the worst in the bloody six-year insurgency.
The town and at least 16 nearby settlements in and around Lake Chad were burnt to the ground and at least 20,000 people forced to flee their homes.
“For five kilometers, I kept stepping on dead bodies until I reached Malam Karanti village, which was also deserted and burnt,” one survivor, fisherman Yanaye Grema, said.
But there was no independent corroboration of the huge numbers of dead cited locally.
Boko Haram were seen as behind the attack in Maiduguri as it has increasingly used women and young girls as human bombs in their deadly campaign for a hardline Islamic state.
Civilian vigilante Ashiru Mustapha said the blast happened as the girl was being searched at the entrance to the market.
“The girl was about 10 years old and I doubt if she actually knew what was strapped to her body,” he said.
Witness Abubakar Bakura said: “The blast split the suicide bomber into two and flung one part across the road.
“Among the dead are two vigilantes who were searching the girl. I am pretty sure the bomb was remotely controlled.”
A Red Cross official warned: “Many people sustained life-threatening injuries.”
Borno State police spokesman Gideon Jubrin said 19 people were killed but warned that the death toll could rise.
The market in the Borno state capital was cordoned off as health officials began the task of sifting through the wreckage and collecting body parts.
An attack at the same market on December 1 killed more than 10 people, and a week earlier over 45 people lost their lives in an attack there.
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