KATSINA (Nigeria): Two blasts by female suicide bombers killed three people and injured 13 in Nigeria’s Kano city on Monday, bringing the number of attacks this week in the area to five and overshadowing festivities marking the end of Ramazan.

The violence blamed on Boko Haram Islamists mar­red what was supposed to be a festive day in Kano, a city of more than six million people and the largest in Nigeria’s mainly Muslim north. Kano typically celebrates Eid with a lavish parade on horseback led by the local emir.

But those plans were scrapped late on Sunday following a bombing at a church that killed five people and an attempted suicide attack by a woman at a university that was stopped by police but left five wounded.

On Monday, a woman detonated low-calibre explosives packed to her torso at a petrol station in the Hotoro area on the outskirts of the city, targeting women who had lined up to buy kerosene, Kano police spokesman Musa Magaji Majia said.

The queue was long, said area vendor Habibu Ali, because the widely used cooking gas is often in short supply and when a new shipment comes in women typically rush to their local vendor.

Published in Dawn, July 29th, 2014