Thursday, 28th March 2024
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Guard killed in suicide attack in Maiduguri

A security guard was killed early Saturday after two attackers blew themselves up in Maiduguri, a city in northeastern Nigeria that has regularly been targeted by Boko Haram Islamists, officials said.

A security guard was killed early Saturday after two attackers blew themselves up in Maiduguri, a city in northeastern Nigeria that has regularly been targeted by Boko Haram Islamists, officials said.

About an hour after midnight (0000 GMT) “three suicide bombers, two men and a woman, tried to enter the University of Maiduguri, but were spotted by university security who stopped them for questioning,” the country’s NEMA emergency management agency said in a statement.

“During questioning, the two men detonated their explosives, killing one of the guards and wounding another,” an agency spokesman, Abdulkadir Ibrahim, said in the statement.

The third suicide bomber managed to hide near a church on the campus and detonated her device damaging the structure but leaving no victims, he said.

A security source confirmed that a security guard had been killed, and told AFP that the wounded guard was a Nigerian army soldier.

Boko Haram Islamists have increasingly resorted to suicide attacks against civilians and security positions, as the group has been weakened by a sustained military counter-insurgency.

Civilians have been worst affected by the eight-year conflict, which has killed at least 20,000 in Nigeria alone and made more than 2.6 million others homeless.

This month, 82 of the more than 200 Nigerian schoolgirls who were kidnapped by Boko Haram in 2014 were released after negotiations with the government, but 113 are still being held.

Late on Friday, Boko Haram released a video claiming to show the Chibok schoolgirls who refused to be rescued as part of the swap deal.

In the three-minute video, a woman who claims to be Maida Yakubu is seen wearing a black veil and holding a gun.

Flanked by three other women clad in black, she proclaims her loyalty to Boko Haram, and says she does not want to return to her parents “in the town of unbelief”.

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