A suicide-car bombing in the northern Nigerian city of Kano killed at least five people late yesterday after it detonated in a mainly Christian area, while police said they foiled a second attack.
The bomber and four other people died in the explosion near a bar at 10 p.m. in the Sabon Gari area of Nigeria’s largest city in the predominately Muslim north, Musa Magaji Majiya, a spokesman for Kano state police, said by phone today. Another car primed with explosives was discovered shortly after the explosion about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) away.
“A Mitsubishi car ash in color was discovered by our men along Tafawa Balewa road in the city, primed with two gas cylinders wired with a 25 liters of petroleum,” Aderenle Shinaba, the Kano state police commissioner, told reporters today at the site of the explosion. Police didn’t provide a number for those injured.
The bombing is the first in Kano since July when multiple blasts killed at least 24 people in the same Sabon Gari area. Nigeria’s government has been battling the Islamist militant group Boko Haram, which has killed thousands of people since 2009 in the north and capital, Abuja.
Boko Haram, which means “western education is a sin” in the local Hausa language, is fighting a violent campaign to create an Islamic state and sparked an international outcry after it kidnapped more than 200 girls in the northeastern village of Chibok last month.
The U.S. has agreed on terms with Nigeria for sharing images and other intelligence gathered in the course of its assistance to the West African country in searching for the kidnapped girls, Pentagon spokesman Colonel Steve Warren said today.
The U.S. is now conducting round-the-clock surveillance of Nigeria in search of the girls, according to Warren.
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