MAIDUGURI: At least 54 people were killed in a series of blasts in the northeast Nigerian city of Maiduguri, police said on Monday, the latest attacks by Boko Haram militants on “soft” civilian targets.

The attacks targeted the Ajilari Cross evening market area and neighbouring Gomari, hitting worshippers at a mosque and football fans watching a televised match.

The army and rescuers said the explosions were caused by homemade devices but one local and the police said a female suicide bomber also blew herself up.

“Fifty-four persons died while 90 others were injured,” Borno state police spokesman Victor Isuku told reporters.

“Those injured are being treated at Umaru Shehu General hospital and the (Borno) State Specialist hospital respectively”. Locals however, put the death toll at at least 21.

The blasts — the latest to hit the city in the six-year insurgency — came after Nigeria’s army claimed the rebels were in disarray.

But Boko Haram’s shadowy leader Abubakar Shekau denied the group was a spent force, describing the military claims as “lies” in an audio recording published via social media on Saturday.

The explosions also followed a warning from Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari that “conventional” Boko Haram attacks were decreasing but that suicide and homemade bomb outrages could continue.

Army spokesman Sani Usman said the blasts, which locals believed could have been aimed to distract security forces to enable an attack on the city, “signify (a) high level of desperation on the part of the Boko Haram terrorists”.

Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state and the birthplace of Boko Haram in 2002, has been the epicentre of the six-year-old insurgency and repeatedly attacked since Buhari assumed office.

Bashir Ibrahim, who lives in the densely populated Gomari area, near Maiduguri airport, said there were “four separate blasts that went off simultaneously”. At least six people were killed in the first at Ajilari Cross, which in May came under heavy shelling from Boko Haram fighters.

Published in Dawn, September 22nd, 2015

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