KANO: A suicide bombing killed at least 15 people in north-eastern Nigeria on Monday while 132 inmates were at large after a daring prison break.

The attack in Potiskum, the commercial capital of Yobe state, came as Shias marked Ashura.

The prison break saw armed gunmen use dynamite to blast open the detention facility in central Kogi state late on Sunday, more than two years after Boko Haram launched an attack at the same facility.

Also read: Bomb attack kills 10 at bus stop in Nigeria

Meanwhile in Adamawa state, also in northeast Nigeria, tens of thousands of people fled their homes to refugee camps after the militants seized control of the commercial hub of Mubi.

The three incidents underscored fragile security in Nigeria and again looked likely to dent government claims of a ceasefire deal and peace talks to end five years of deadly Boko Haram violence.

The group’s leader, Abubakar Shekau, on Friday dismissed the government’s assertion of talks and an end to hostilities as “a lie”.

He also claimed that the 219 schoolgirls kidnapped in mid-April, whose plight caught world attention, had all converted to Islam and been “married off”.

In Potiskum, police and eyewitnesses said a bomb went off 10 metres from a seminary where Shia worshippers had gathered for a procession.

“We lost 15 of our members in a suicide blast at the end of our Ashura procession,” the head of the city’s Shia community, Mustapha Lawan Nasidi, said.

Fifty people were also injured, he said, adding that several others died when troops who deployed to the scene opened fire. There was no immediate response from the military.

Potiskum is the economic capital of Yobe, which with Borno and Adamawa states have been under emergency rule since May of last year because of the insurgency.

The area has seen repeated violence, including attacks on the Shia community.

In July, four Shias were killed in a bomb attack blamed on the Sunni Islamists of Boko Haram at an open-air mosque in the Dogo Tebo area of the city.

In Kogi, national police spokesman Emmanuel Ojukwu said unidentified gunmen blew up the prison with explosives late on Sunday, allowing scores to escape.

Jacob Edi, spokesman for Kogi’s Governor Idris Wada, added: “There were 145 prisoners at the time of the attack.

“One died, eight have been recaptured and four surrendered voluntarily. The rest are at large.”

Kogi is far south of Boko Haram’s main area of operations but the Islamists claimed a prison raid at the same facility in 2012 that freed more than 100 inmates.

In Adamawa, the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) said they had recorded at least 10,496 internally displaced people in five camps in the state capital, Yola, after violence in Mubi.

Thousands of residents from Mubi, which is Adamawa’s second-largest town, have fled in the past week after Boko Haram’s take-over of the town last Wednesday.

Published in Dawn, November 4th , 2014