At least 150 people died in a “heinous” wave of gun and bomb attacks in northern Nigeria that were on Saturday claimed by the Islamist Boko Haram sect. President Goodluck Jonathan condemned the assaults which officials said included at least five suicide bomb blasts and “directed security agencies to ensure the arrest of perpetrators of these heinous acts,” said a statement from his spokesman Reuben Abati.
As corpses piled up in the morgue, a rescue agency official said the body count stood at 150. “I was involved in the evacuation of corpses to the morgue. I personally counted 150 bodies,” the official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said at the hospital. He said some families had already collected their loved ones for burial, reducing the number to 97 by end of the day. The Red Cross earlier said the death toll stood at 63, while police spoke of 53, of whom 11 were members of its force. The 15-nation UN Security Council released a statement saying it “condemned in the strongest terms” the attacks in Nigeria. The council expressed condolences to the families. A member of Nigeria’s Boko Haram sect on Saturday claimed responsibility.
“We are responsible for the attack in (northeastern) Borno (state) and Damaturu,” Abul Qaqa said by phone. “We will continue attacking federal government formations until security forces stop persecuting our members and vulnerable civilians,” Qaqa warned.
The Friday bomb and gun attacks targeted police stations, an army base and churches in the cities of Damaturu, Maiduguri and two other small towns.
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. Nigeria’s more than 160 million people are divided almost in half between Muslims and Christians, living roughly in the north and south of the country respectively. Regions where they overlap are prey to frequent tensions.
