LAGOS (Reuters) – Security guards shot dead on Saturday a man who was trying to detonate a bomb at a camp in northeastern Nigeria for people displaced during a seven-year insurgency waged by Islamist militant group Boko Haram.
PR Nigeria, a state-approved agency, said the incident occurred at a spot where refugees are screened before entering the camp, which is located in the Muna Garage district of the city of Maiduguri.
Ibrahim Abdulkadir, a spokesman for the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), confirmed that the suicide bomber had been killed.
The attempted suicide bombing came a day after multiple blasts rocked Maiduguri, the birthplace of the jihadist insurgency in Nigeria, killing two people and four suicide bombers.
Nobody has claimed responsibility for the attacks on Friday and Saturday but they bore the hallmarks of Boko Haram. The group targets crowded areas — such as markets, places of worship and refugee camps — in suicide bomb attacks across northeast Nigeria and in neighbouring Cameroon and Niger.
Boko Haram has killed some 15,000 people and forced more than two million people to flee their homes during the group’s attempt to create a state in northeastern Nigeria that adheres to strict Islamic laws.
Nigeria’s army has pushed the militant group back to its stronghold in the vast Sambisa forest of the northeast in the last few months and bombings have decreased in frequency.
However, last month a car bomb killed eight people in Maiduguri and two suicide bombers killed a further eight in the city. Raids by gunmen on remote northeastern villages have also been reported in the last few weeks.
(Reporting by Alexis Akwagyiram; Editing by Gareth Jones)
