Islamist sect claims deadly bomb attacks

A member of Nigeria’s Islamist Boko Haram sect yesterday claimed responsibility for the wave of bomb attacks that killed at least 63 people in the northeast of the country last Friday.

“We are responsible for the attack in Borno (state) and Damaturu,” Abul Qaqa told an AFP correspondent by phone.

Boko Haram has been blamed for scores of bomb blasts and shootings, mainly in Nigeria’s northeast.

“We will continue attacking federal government formations until security forces stop persecuting our members and vulnerable civilians,” Qaqa vowed.

The Friday bomb and gun attacks targeted police stations, an army base and churches in the northeastern Nigerian cities of Damaturu, where all the deaths occurred along with hundreds wounded, and Maiduguri.

Authorities said two of the attacks were carried out by suicide bombers.

A lawyer who visited Damaturu’s government hospital yesterday looking for a missing friend said he counted 60 bodies in the morgue, “all brought in yesterday from the attacks”.

An AFP reporter who also visited the morgue said most of the dead appeared to be policemen.

The string of attacks came two days ahead of the annual Muslim celebration of Eid al-Adha, or the Feast of Sacrifice.

Police have been placed on red alert nationwide.

Militants from Boko Haram, whose name means ‘Western education is sin’ in the regional Hausa language, have in the past targeted police and military, community and religious leaders, as well as politicians.

The sect, which wants to see the establishment of an Islamic state in northern Nigeria, staged an uprising which was brutally put down by security forces in 2009.

It claimed responsibility for the August 26 bombing of the UN headquarters in the capital Abuja which killed 24 people, as well as a June attack on the national police headquarters, also in the capital.