Tue, Jan 14 2014
By Lanre Ola and Ibrahim Mshelizza MAIDUGURI, Nigeria (Reuters)
A car bomb killed at least 29 people on Tuesday in Nigeria’s northeastern city of Maiduguri, the epicenter of an Islamist revolt, witnesses said. No one claimed responsibility for the
blast. But militant sect Boko Haram,
founded in the city, has repeatedly
attacked schools, churches and
government and military targets in its
four-year-old campaign.
The attack will be a setback for President Goodluck Jonathan’s military crackdown, which had temporarily succeeded in pushing Boko Haram’s assaults into rural areas. Boko Haram gunmen stormed the airforce base and military barracks around Maiduguri’s airport on December 2, ending six months of relative calm in the city.
The bomb, planted in a three-wheel
rickshaw taxi, exploded outside the state television offices at around 1.30 pm (1230 GMT), witnesses told Reuters. “The attack happened just behind the fence of my office. I counted 29 bodies, including two kids and a mother. Lots of others seriously injured,” said Abba Kankami, a journalist working at the state television office.
Another witness, Baba Shiek, said he
counted 30 bodies.Military Spokesman Muhammad Dole said in a statement soldiers had arrested one person suspected of being behind what he called “heinous and dastardly acts”.Borno State Police Commissioner Lawan Tanko said 17 people were confirmed dead but the final death toll could be higher.
“TOO MUCH BLOOD”
“I saw two boys on the ground and their bodies cut into pieces, two other cars immediately caught fire and I ran away because there was too much blood,” city resident Aisha Hassan told Reuters.
Soldiers fired shots into the air to
disperse crowds before cordoning off
roads around the scene, witnesses said. Dozens of youths, some armed with machetes, protested on the street after the attack, accusing politicians of failing to curb Boko Haram. The violence killed thousands last year.
Boko Haram fighters continue to target military outposts and raid villages in remote regions near borders with Cameroon and Chad. The radical Islamist sect says it is fighting
to create an Islamic state in a country of nearly 170 million, split roughly equally between Christians and Muslims.
Maiduguri is the capital of Borno State, where Boko Haram first launched its uprising in 2009, beginning with drive-by shootings of policemen and quickly developing the scale and sophistication of its attacks. Tuesday is a public holiday in Nigeria, as millions of Muslims mark the Prophet Mohammad’s birthday.
Boko Haram and splinter Islamist groups are viewed as the biggest security threat in Africa’s second largest economy and biggest oil producer. The United States and its allies are increasingly concerned that Islamist groups in Nigeria will strengthen ties with al Qaeda’s north African wing.
A Boko Haram suicide attack on the
United Nations building in 2011 in the
capital Abuja killed at least 25 people.
Beegeagle's Blog 
Campaigning for 2015 has begun
highly insensitive
This is going to be a long war. Probably inter-generational with ebbs and flows and I think we should just brace and hunker down for it. It is ideological and has since exceeded the local politics of Borno
We are dealing with global terrorists, this is not going away, we need long term strategies such as walling the borders and perhaps mining them, Israel did that as well. Forever we shall have the seventh division in that position to do what needs to be done.
The military is doing a very good job.
But the good note is the more time and effort we spend on this menace, the less menacing it becomes and the easier to curtail it becomes. Soon enough we shall be as security aware as Israel and our society will grow stronger and more united and will aim at the sky.
Indiscriminate car bombing does not bear the hall mark of boko-haram. They have always had a target.
The BH targets were the people that died.
BH targets travelers, villagers, and students in just the same way.
Indiscriminate is the hallmark of BH.
BH kills to scare, unbalance and stay relevant.
Did you just crawl out from under a rock?
Thank you, some people seem to have idealized boko haram, I still don’t know why they would idealize a bunch of throat gutting terrorists.
You make me laugh. You obviously lack documentation on the terrorist activities of boko haram, yet you seem to want to talk as an authority figure in the subject.
I am sorry but this kind of attitude annoys me, because I am a Nigerian and people like you keep misleading the world to see boko haram as gentle people marginalized. I have totaled more than 200 hours of documentation on these boko haram animals and I am often fascinated by the dangerous cluelessness of some people who called themselves journalists and tried to speak as if they had done theiwork.
their homework
(EDIT) car bombing state T.V. still looks suspicious, just not boko-haram enough for me.Unless they are becoming desperate and have abandoned the military style raid idea in the face of deadly responses from the NA.
The boko haram are TERRORISTS, their aim is a mass genocide, that is what they do.
The same boko haram “military style” raided a primary school fool of innocent children and a student hostel full of sleeping students and also they “military style” raided a french family among which 4 kids. They also “military style” raided a poor innocent womans neck (while calling her a soldier) and they “military style” raided some poor Yoruba merchants necks they also “military style” raided a highway full of unarmed motorists and killed many of those unarmed civilians on the road. They had been “military style” raiding Kaduna for quite a while before the declaration of state of emergency. I think you are giving a new definition to “military style raid”.
Let us not forget boko haram has been “military style” raiding churches full of unarmed innocent civilians as well.
bh rarely does car bombings in borno like this, either its some new tactic of bh or not bh.
Yeah, go and tell that to the churches and market places and bus parks which were bombed by boko haram.
And the same clueless journalists will soon start calling the checkpoints an oppressive tool again.
I guess you can see why the army installed check points now !
No checkpoint implies explosions everyday, checkpoints implies less than one explosion in 6 months.
The goal of BH is to
1) Incite fear in the minds of the populace by killing people everywhere, anyhow and anytime.
2) Ridicule the gov by launching attacks especially after every declaration of success by gov official
3) Ridicule the military by attacking barracks and other military formations
BH does not favour any style of engagement neither do they prefer a particular kind of weapon. They have killed young men watching EPL, they HV killed pupils in their sleep in hostels, they have attacked military formations, UN building, they kill health workers, worshippers in religious centers and they attack media houses. In these they use cutlass, AKs, GPMG and VBIED.
BH has no scruples, anything goes.
I’m is support of peaceful demonstration by the youths as it will compel their leaders to take this more seriously and commit more resources to this war. Aside for the BH living in the bother areas and the ones hiding in the jungles and mountains, hundreds of them are still being harbored in towns and cities by apologists. The gov can put pressure on those landlords to evict/flush them out for the military to engage in less densely populated areas.
This attack just goes to say we need to redouble our effort, we are still far from Uhuru
Bros…..car bombs is what gave boko haram international recognition. That used to be their hallmark until the Nigerian Armed forces clamped down and drastically reduced it. Go through the archives here and you would be enlightened. True this could be political, but its wrong to call it so until evidence point otherwise.
SInce when did BH not use indiscriminate car bombs against civilians? The Sabon Gari bus bombs? Churches. This is very much their MO.
However note that recent attacks have started targeting political figures particularly in places where political power is in flux. The exact nature of this dynamic is hard to fathom as to whether BH is taking advantage to cause natural fissures or the politicians are exploiting the confusion to deal with opponents but the South-south and North are going to be hell in the run up to the election.
As ever it will be the poor and powerless who will suffer while the big men ride around in bomb proof convoys
For the sake of a clarity,let me explain myself better.Our armed forces have so pressed boko haram that i dont think they should still have the capacity for this(Planned bombing) so deep in maiduguri. This bombing takes time,planning,a safe haven and an intelligence network.Previous bombings had a specific target,Christian churches,people of other tribes in a concentrated area,U.N. building, Leadership connected to Government e.t.c. In recent times,after losing their capacity to plan bombings as the military put pressure on them and drove them out to the border,, they switched to military raids. So in summary, its either they have regained their capacity to plan bombings(which is bad),they have abandoned their military raids and consider it a failure and have switched to alqaeda style indiscriminate bombings(worse) or this is politicians using them as scape goats to cause confusion and gain political capital ahead of elections. In all i may be wrong,but one thing i am sure off is that they are terrorist and murderers(BH).
Once again this is not about what Boko haram is, we all know the answer to that, the question is,have they regained their previous capacity/network despite the efforts of our security agencies?
The point is not the planning etc, planning is just one point of an IED chain
An IED chain needs money, supplies, transport, IED maker, transport for IED or cell members, the IED emplacer and the detonater, is a SVBIED the latter 2 are combined.
To get an SVBIED into Maiduguri, it either was built in Maiduguri or was taken there. So it got there through multiple checkpoints? Or someone got the components in through multiple checkpoints.
Now what has come into Maiduguri of recent?
What has changed?
It could simply be that BH has managed to reconstitute their networks, again not very difficult when you factor in the time and networks they already have, the money they have from the Fr Vandenbeusch and Moulin-Fournier kidnappings. The free availability of arms, experts and explosive material from CAR, Southern Libya etc
It is again a matter of time before they get out of the box and as they are under military pressure and unable to mass for their ground attacks this might have been one they had stored up and waiting.
I generally don’t touch politics with a barge pole but on the other hand I would strongly suggest that both parties have a serious incentive to launch attacks, (1) to frighten people and either have elections nullified (2) to show that those in charge of security are incompetent (3) to demonstrate that people of a certain party are associated with terrorists.
The list goes on and on. But any analysis will show that both sets of politicians have a motive to either perpetrate this or allow it to be perpetrated.This is just s theory and I am not accusing anyone