30th July, 2014
A bomb attack in the northern Nigerian city of Kano on Sunday killed four Christians and a soldier, sources said.
The bomb was hurled over a fence of St Charles Catholic Church as parishioners were leaving a worship service, they said; Islamic extremists from the Boko Haram terrorist group were suspected.
“The bomb was thrown by the Boko Haram bomber over the fence behind the church, because the church leadership had mounted a barricade on the entrance of the church,” church member Gabriel George told Morning Star News. “Four members of our church died, and eight others who were injured are in hospital receiving treatment.”
A Christian leader in Kano whose identity is undisclosed for security reasons confirmed that four church members died in the attack on the predominantly Christian quarter of Sabon Gari, where Boko Haram has struck before.
“The attack on the St. Charles Catholic Church here in Kano is a continuing onslaught by the radical Islamic elements of the Boko Haram sect,” he said. “It is unfortunate that we have continued to be at the receiving end of the agenda by Islamists to create an Islamic state in northern Nigeria.”
Kano state police corroborated accounts, saying the bomb was detonated on church premises, killing four church members, a soldier on duty at the facility, and injuring eight others.
Also on Sunday in the city, five police officers were injured in the course of preventing a suicide bomber outside a university, police said. Hiding the bomb under a long black hijab, or full-body covering, the woman blew herself up after police requested that a female colleague frisk her.
Another bomb in the Sabon Gari area exploded at a bus station on Thursday (24th July), killing a woman and injuring eight other people, police said. Boko Haram was also suspected in that incident. At a public health college in Kano on 23rd June, a bomb blast killed at least eight people, and a suicide car bomb explosion in Sabon Gari on 19th May killed four people, including a young girl.
While Boko Haram (translated as “Western education is a sin”) is the moniker residents of Maiduguri, Borno state gave the insurgents, the group calls itself the Jama”atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda”awati wal-Jihad, translated as “The Congregation of the People of Tradition for Proselytism and Jihad.” It seeks to impose sharia (Islamic law) throughout Nigeria.
The group has links with Al Shabaab in Somalia and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. Christians make up 51.3 per cent of Nigeria”s population of 158.2 million, while Muslims account for 45 per cent and live mainly in the north.
