(Kano) Nineteen people were killed and more than twenty injured when a bomb exploded in a teahouse in a village in northeastern Nigeria, where a jihadist insurgency has been raging for more than 14 years, security sources said on Thursday.
The explosion occurred on Wednesday evening in the village of Kawuri, located about fifty kilometers from Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State.
“There was an explosion in a tea shop in Kawuri around 8pm yesterday. We found 19 dead bodies and 27 wounded,” Ibrahim Liman, a member of an anti-jihadist militia working with the army, told AFP on Thursday. Two other militiamen confirmed the toll.
Another Kawuri militia commander, Kurmi Challume, said the attack was carried out by a suicide bomber.
No group has claimed responsibility for the blast, but the jihadist group Boko Haram and its rival, the Islamic State in West Africa, are both active in the region.
The governor of Borno state on Thursday declared a 24-hour curfew, according to a police statement. The curfew was also imposed on the day of nationwide protests, including in Maiduguri, over rising living costs.
Islamist militants still operate from their rural hideouts, but bombings have become less frequent in the northeast.
“Boko Haram struck in Kawuri last night. They took us all by surprise because it has been a while since such attacks took place,” Babakura Kolo, an anti-jihadist militia leader, told AFP.
He said the injured had been taken to hospitals in Maiduguri.
Contacted by AFP, the Nigerian army did not immediately respond.
Insecurity
The attack comes weeks after suicide bombings killed a total of 32 people in the Gwoza area of Borno state, targeting a wedding, a hospital and a funeral.
Bombings in Nigeria’s cities have become rare since the military pushed the jihadists back from territory they controlled at the start of the conflict in 2014, but they still carry out attacks and ambushes in rural areas.
Jihadist fighters particularly target men and abduct women who venture outside towns and villages in search of firewood.
Having come to power a little over a year ago, Mr Tinubu had made the fight against insecurity a priority of his mandate, but the results are slow in coming.
Nigerian armed forces are also battling heavily armed gangs in the northwest of the country.
Since 2009, Nigeria has been facing an armed jihadist insurgency in the northeast that has left 40,000 dead and two million displaced.
In addition to the 14-year-old jihadist insurgency, Africa’s most populous country, with more than 220 million people, faces powerful armed criminal gangs, inter-communal fighting and separatist tensions.