Gunmen in Nigeria have killed at least one officer after opening fire on a police station in the city of Kano, where attacks claimed by Islamists left 185 dead last week, police said Saturday. Security forces in Africa’s most populous nation and top oil producer are struggling to contain the menace by the Boko Haram Islamist sect that has used increasingly bold tactics to kill more than 200 people this year alone.
The latest attack in Kano, the economic heart of Nigeria’s mainly Muslim north, occurred just before 7:00 pm (1800 GMT) on Friday, police said on Saturday, confirming the assault first reported by residents. Gunmen “opened fire on our men and the policemen on duty fired back leading to a shootout,” city police spokesman Magaji Majia said, adding that one officer was killed. Witnesses had previously told AFP two officers had died.
The attack came at the start of a nighttime curfew that has been in effect in the northern city since a January 20 assault by Boko Haram killed 185 people. Kano had previously escaped the worst of Boko Haram’s violence, and the brazen, coordinated strikes that primarily targetted police stations in a major city highlighted the group’s renewed strength. Since then in Kano, another police station was attacked on Tuesday night, with authorities reporting three people wounded and a German engineer was kidnapped on the outskirts of city on Thursday. The Friday night attack happened in the Mandawari neighbourhood. Residents said they heard the gunmen shouting “Allahu Akbar” as they converged on the police station, travelling on motorcyles and in an all-terrain vehicle.
The purported head of Boko Haram, Abubakar Muhammad Shekau, threatened more violence in an audio recording recently posted on YouTube. Shekau has been seen by some as more eager to resort to violence than his predecessor, Mohammed Yusuf, and under his leadership, Boko Haram is seemingly able to strike at will. Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan has faced scathing criticism for failures to stem the violence and fired the country’s police chief this week, vowing to overhaul a force that had lost public trust amid the deepening security crisis.
The police in southeastern Enugu state told AFP on Saturday that 25 armed men believed to have come from the violence-plagued predominantly Muslim north were arrested Friday while travelling on a bus headed to the mainly Christian south. The men were found with 19 home-made guns and some machetes during a search at a highway police checkpoint. There were no initial indications the men were Islamist fighters, said spokesman Ebere Amaraizu, but added “the timing (of their trip) is wrong,” clarifying that the arrests were made amid heightened security concerns. Boko Haram has previously said that it wants to create an Islamic state in Nigeria’s deeply-impoverished mainly Muslim north, and has charged the government with harassing Muslims and raiding Islamic schools. The group was also blamed for coordinated attacks on Christmas Day, the mostly deadly at a Catholic Church near the capital Abuja where at least 44 people were killed, but the group’s victims in general, also include scores of Muslims.
