MAIDUGURI – The attackers came on Christmas Eve with guns blazing and armed with homemade bombs, shooting a security guard in the head and seeming to want to burn down the church.
A priest at the evangelical church in the northern city of Maiduguri, along with the senior pastor, his wife and another church member, witnessed the shooting and ran for cover. Three blasts went off, but the church did not burn. “The four of us rushed into the senior pastor’s quarters within the church premises and began to pray because that was all we could do,” said the priest, Simon Kuje. It was one of three churches attacked the same night in Maiduguri, leaving a total of six dead, and another round of violence in Nigeria’s north blamed on an Islamist sect that launched an uprising in 2009.
The attacks in recent months have led to intense fear here. Police restrict movements to avoid being targeted and residents refuse to provide information on suspected sect members because they worry about reprisals.
Tension has also built between police and residents, who accuse officers of abusive raids on innocent people’s homes out of desperation to locate sect members.
But at the same time, much remains unclear about the sect known as Boko Haram, including its size and capabilities.
Authorities had previously claimed to have crushed the group after a police and military assault ended the 2009 uprising, leaving hundreds dead, only to see it reemerge a year later. There have been suggestions that it has sought to form links with Al-Qaeda’s north Africa branch, but the extent of such contact, if any, is difficult to gauge. Such questions have intensified in the approach to April elections, and some say certain recent killings may have a political link.
Security sources blame the sect for the killings of around 80 people in Maiduguri in the past seven months. Many of the victims have been police officers and community leaders targeted by gunmen on motorcycles.
Suspected sect members have also raided police posts and a prison, and have engaged security forces in deadly shootouts.
In a video posted on a website, the suspected leader of the sect claimed responsibility for bomb blasts that killed dozens in the central Nigerian city of Jos, also on Christmas Eve.
Police, however, cast doubt on the claim, which would mark the first such attack by the Islamists outside of Nigeria’s predominately Muslim north.
“My message to my Muslim brethren is that they should know that this war is a war between Muslims and infidels,” the suspected sect leader, Abubakar Shekau, said in the video. “This is a religious war.”
