Things are not looking too good in northeast Nigeria right now: At least 67 are dead after a police headquarters was bombed and government offices were burned yesterday. More details after the jump!
Residents fearfully left their homes Saturday to bury their dead in northeast Nigeria following a series of coordinated attacks that killed at least 67 people and left a new police headquarters in ruins, government offices burned and symbols of state power destroyed.
A radical Muslim sect known locally as Boko Haram claimed responsibility for the attacks in Borno and Yobe states, with the worst damage done in and around the city of Damaturu. The group also promised to continue its bloody sectarian fight against Nigeria’s weak central government, with residents nervously moving through empty streets, waiting for the next attack.
“There’s that fear that something might possibly happen again,” Nigerian Red Cross official Ibrahim Bulama said.
In Damaturu, the capital of Yobe state, a car bomb exploded Friday afternoon outside a three-story building used as a military office and barracks, killing many uniformed security agents, Bulama said.
Gunmen then went through the town, blowing up a bank and attacking at least three police stations and some churches, leaving them in rubble, he said. Gunfire continued through the night and gunmen raided the village of Potiskum near the capital as well, witnesses said, leaving at least two people dead there.
Two suicide bombers detonated explosives inside vehicles in the nearby city of Maiduguri on Saturday night, but no casualties were reported in the surrounding areas, police said.On Saturday morning, people began hesitantly leaving their homes, seeing the destruction left behind which included military and police vehicles burned by the gunmen with the burned corpses of the drivers who died still in their seats.
Bulama spoke to The Associated Press by telephone Saturday morning from a common Muslim burial ground in the city as his family buried a relative and friend, a police officer who died after suffering a gunshot wound to the head in the fighting.
