ABUJA, Nigeria – An explosion ripped through a busy commuter bus station on the outskirts of Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, before 7 a.m. Monday as hundreds of people were travelling to work.
Many are feared dead. Reporters saw rescue workers and police gathering body parts.
The blast ripped a large hole in the ground of Nyanya Motor Park, 16 kilometres from the city centre and destroyed more than 30 vehicles, causing secondary explosions as their fuel tanks ignited and burned.
There was no official comment or an immediate claim for the explosion though bus stations are a favoured target of Nigeria’s Islamic extremists.
The Islamic extremists have been threatening to attack the capital, in the middle of the country and hundreds of kilometres from its traditional base in the northeast, where it has killed nearly 1,500 people this year.
The Boko Haram terrorist network last attacked the capital in 2011 when it claimed a suicide bombing by two explosives-laden cars that drove into the lobby of the United Nations office building in Abuja. It killed at least 21 people and wounded 60.
The militants are blamed for attacks in northeast Nigeria that have killed more than 50 people in the past five days, including eight teachers living at a boarding school that had been closed because of frequent attacks on schools in which hundreds of students have died.
Boko Haram – the nickname means “western education is forbidden” – has been attacking schools, villages, market places and military barracks and checkpoints this year in increasingly frequent and deadly attacks. Its mission is to force an Islamic state on Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country of some 170 million people divided almost equally between Muslims living mainly in the north and Christians in the south.
The military has claimed that it has the extremists on the run with near-daily air bombardments and ground assaults on hideouts in forests and mountain caves along the border with Cameroon.
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