A bomb blast rocked a popular drinking spot by an army barracks in northern Nigeria on Sunday, killing a dozen people hours after President Goodluck Jonathan was sworn in for his first full term, officials said.
A rescue worker who asked not to be identified told Reuters his colleagues had counted 12 dead bodies and that about 25 people had been wounded by the blast.
The explosion hit the Mamy market on the edge of the city of Bauchi at about 8pm (7pm GMT), police commissioner Muhammed Indabawa said. He said it was not clear who was responsible and that no arrests had yet been made.
“It was a very strong and powerful explosion,” Yushua Shuaib, spokesperson for the National Emergency Management Agency (Nema), told Reuters, adding that the wounded had been taken to hospital. He declined to comment on the death toll.
A second, smaller explosion hit a beer parlour in Zuba on the outskirts of the capital Abuja, although the cause was unknown and there were only three minor injuries, Shuaib said.
Bauchi neighbours Plateau state in Nigeria’s “Middle Belt” where the mostly Muslim north meets the predominantly Christian south, a region beset by years of sectarian violence.
Hundreds of people were killed in northern towns last month in riots and reprisal killings after Jonathan, a Christian from the south, was declared winner of a presidential election, beating northern Muslim and former army ruler Muhammadu Buhari.
There were several bomb blasts at campaign rallies in the run-up to the April elections, most of them using home-made improvised devices and carried out by unknown assailants.
Security in Abuja was tight for Jonathan’s inauguration earlier on Sunday with police and army checkpoints on all roads into the city, anti-bomb squad officers on the streets and helicopters buzzing overhead.
Militants from the southern Niger Delta oil region claimed car bombs which killed 10 people near a parade in Abuja last October but the group has since been largely inactive.
The perpetrators of a second car bombing in Abuja on New Year’s Eve, also at a popular market close to an army barracks, have still not been identified.
Boko Haram, a radical Islamist sect based in the remote north-east, has carried out frequent fire bombings of police stations and government buildings in its home region and also claimed Christmas Eve bombings in the Middle Belt city of Jos. – Reuters