JOS, NIGERIA // At least 44 people were killed in twin bomb blasts in the central Nigerian city of Jos, the emergency services said on Monday, after a wave of mass casualty attacks blamed on Boko Haram militants.
Sunday’s blasts happened within minutes of each other at a shopping complex and near a mosque in the religiously divided capital of Plateau state, which the rebels have targeted before.
“At the moment we have 44 dead bodies and 47 others injured from the scenes of the two attacks,” said Mohammed Abdulsalam, from the national emergency management agency (Nema) .
Umar Abubakar, who was at the Yantaya mosque, said a number of attackers opened fire from outside at about 9.20pm on Sunday.
“They fire an RPG [rocket propelled grenade] at the mosque but it hit a metal bar on the facade and exploded,” he said. “Many people were killed and injured from the shooting and the explosion.
“It was a miracle I escaped.”
Daybreak showed the mosque pockmarked with bullet holes and stained with blood, while footwear, books and other personal items were strewn on the ground.
The second attack targeted the packed Shagalinku restaurant in a shopping complex on the Bauchi Road, which is popular with travellers from the north-east.
Local resident Mohammed Shafi’i said the whole neighbourhood shook from the blast and he counted 25 bodies, including four waitresses.
“The restaurant was badly damaged. Bits of human flesh, blood stains, plastic tables and chairs and all sorts of personal items litter the place,” he said.
The carnage in Jos followed a suicide attack on a church in the northeastern city of Potiskum on Sunday, which left five people dead, including two children.
Last week, Islamist militants fighters raided a number of villages around the Lake Chad area, killing more than 150 worshippers as they prayed in mosques.
Muhammadu Buhari, who became president on May 29, said on Sunday that Boko Haram, which has allied itself to the ISIL group in Syria and Iraq, had “declared war on all that we value”.
He promised to do “everything possible to eradicate Boko Haram, terrorism and mindless extremism from Nigeria in the shortest possible time”.
* Agence France-Presse