At least 15 people were killed Tuesday in a suicide blast in the northeastern Nigerian city of Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state, which has been bedeviled by the deadly Boko Haram insurgency, a witness and a paramedic said.
The explosion occurred
when a homemade bomb, concealed in a van loaded with charcoal, went off
at an ever-busy traffic circle outside the city's main market, according
to a Twitter account by the Nigerian Defense Ministry.
Witnesses said the blast
happened at about 8:00 a.m., when traffic was beginning to build at the
roundabout, causing a major fire that engulfed vehicles and shops lining
the streets.
Local vigilantes called
Civilian JTF, after the special military unit battling Boko Haram,
evacuated the victims of the morning blast to the State Specialist
Hospital in the city.
"We have so far taken 15
dead bodies to the hospital from the blast scene, most of them women and
boys," said a local vigilante Adam Kolo.
A journalist who was at the hospital confirmed seeing 15 bodies brought in by the rescue team.
A "rescue operation is
still ongoing, which means the toll may change. We have also evacuated
several people with injuries from the explosion," Kolo said.
"I saw several people
lying lifeless on the street with six cars and three motorized rickshaws
burning," said resident Ibrahim Mustapha.
Most of the victims were elderly women selling peanuts and kola nuts by the roadside and poor boys, Kolo said.
It is a custom in
Maiduguri for residents to buy peanuts every morning and give them out
as alms to poor boys begging on the streets.
The women vendors come
out early in the morning and line the streets with their wares, waiting
for residents leaving for work, while the child beggars mill around
waiting for a generous buyer, Mustapha said.
Restive mobs besieged
the area around the blast scene, barring reporters from taking photos of
the carnage, and manhandled a photographer who wanted to take shots.
The mobs attacked and
slightly injured four firefighters trying to quench the inferno at the
scene, accusing them of not deploying fast enough to battle the fire.
"The youth were quite
agitated and prevented us from taking photos of the scene and even
descended on the firemen working to douse the fire," one of the
reporters at the scene said.
Maiduguri has witnessed
relative calm since last year, when local vigilantes sprang up and
chased out Boko Haram insurgents into the bush, ending near-daily deadly
bombing and shooting attacks.
The city has however witnessed isolated bombings and deadly attacks blamed on Boko Haram.
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