On 16 June we left Abuja in Nigeria to continue our southwards journey. It was only a couple of days later when we heard about the bomb that had exploded in front of the main police station in the centre of the city on that very day. After having had the same near-miss experience in Marrakesh, where a bomb exploded in the same restaurant one week after we had had our farewell dinner there, we were once again very relieved that we had left the violence behind us.
This time we are well clear of the city and the country, but the shock and the horror learning about yet another bomb blast in a city that we had come to know and enjoy, a place where we had met people and made friends, is no less serious or disturbing than if it had happened whilst we were there.
Our thoughts and sympathy go to the people of Abuja.
This morning Reuters reports: A car bomb ripped through the United Nations' headquarters in the Nigerian capital of Abuja on Friday, killing at least 18 people, in an attack reminiscent of a June blast claimed by a local radical Islamist sect.
Security sources and witnesses said the car rammed into the building and blew up, badly damaging parts of an office complex where close to 400 people normally work for U.N. agencies. Body parts were strewn on the ground as emergency workers, soldiers and police swarmed around the building, cordoned roads and rushed the wounded to hospital.
No one claimed responsibility for the attack. However, one Abuja-based security source suspected the Nigerian Islamist group Boko Haram, whose strikes have been growing in intensity and spreading further afield, or al Qaeda's North African arm.
"This is very likely the work of Boko Haram and, or, AQIM (al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb) and is a serious escalation in the security situation in Nigeria," the security source said.
In today's attack the car slammed through security gates of the U.N. complex, crashed into the basement and exploded, sending vehicles flying and setting the building ablaze. "When the car got inside it went straight to the basement and exploded, killing people in reception, right and left," said Abuja resident James John, who witnessed the attack. "The entire building, from the ground floor to the topmost, was just fire and smoke. I saw six bodies been carried. I can't believe it."
"All the people in the basement were all killed. Their bodies are littered all over the place. I saw about five dead bodies," said Ocilaje Michael, a U.N. employee at the complex.
The building was blackened from top to bottom. In places, walls were blown away and there were piles of debris from the explosion.
SIMILAR ATTACK
Militant attacks in the oil-producing regions of southern Nigeria have subsided but the north has been hit by a round of bombings and killings by Islamist extremists.
Boko Haram, whose name translates from the local northern Hausa language as "Western education is sinful," has been behind almost daily bombings and shootings, mostly targeting police in the northeast of Africa's most populous nation. The group claimed responsibility for the 16 June bomb attack on the car park of the Abuja police headquarters which bore similarities to Friday's blast at the U.N. building. In the June attack, a car rammed through the gates of the police headquarters in the capital and exploded, killing the bomber and narrowly missing the chief of police.
Boko Haram has mostly targeted its shootings and bombs on police in Nigeria's remote northeast, which borders Cameroon, Chad and Niger, but its ambitions are growing.
President Goodluck Jonathan has set up a committee to investigate the sect, and police and army officers have been making dozens of arrests and engaging group members in gunfights in the last two weeks.
Reuters
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