Boko Haram Suspected in Deadly Suicide Bombing at Nigerian School
CONAKRY, Guinea – A suicide bomber disguised as a student detonated a bomb at a boarding school in northern Nigeria on Monday morning, killing nearly 50 boys who were between 10 and 20 years old, officials and witnesses said.
The bomber was wearing a school uniform when he appeared at the morning assembly at the Government Senior Science Secondary School in Potiskum, according to Mohammed Abubakar, a local journalist who had returned from the scene of the bombing. When the school prefect asked the bomber why he was not wearing the school’s badge, he knelt down and detonated the bomb, Abubakar said.
Afterward, witnesses said, the school was a chaotic scene of dead and maimed children, and the local hospital was packed with the wounded.
Northern Nigeria has long been crippled by an Islamist insurgency, and the militant group Boko Haram has targeted non-Quranic schools for at least the last three years, killing dozens of students and kidnapping hundreds of others. Monday’s bombing, which also wounded nearly 80, was one of the worst such attacks to date.
Boko Haram did not claim responsibility for Monday’s bombing – it rarely does for individual attacks – but it has made what it calls “Western education” a particular focus of its bloody campaign against civilians and soldiers.
Despite the repeated school attacks and multiple student deaths, Nigeria’s military has not been deployed to guard the schools of the north, and there was no military presence before the blast at the Potiskum school Monday, Abubakar said.
The school was “not safe. It is porous,” he said, adding that even the school gate was broken.
Parents who gathered at the school after the bombing angrily told the military to leave, saying they “no longer had confidence” in the soldiers “because they were not able to protect their lives and property,” said Abubakar. Some news reports suggested rocks were thrown at the soldiers.
Reflecting a rising tide of criticism against the Nigerian government, which has ceded large sections of territory to the Islamist militants in the northeast this year, the governor of Yobe state issued a strongly-worded statement Monday saying it was “not just enough for the federal government to condemn the almost daily rounds of violence.” Instead, he said “urgent action” was needed.