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By Mike Oboh | Reuters KANO (Reuters) - Gun and bomb attacks by Islamist insurgents in the
northern Nigerian city of Kano last week killed at least 178 people, a
hospital doctor said on Sunday, underscoring the challenge President
Goodluck Jonathan faces to prevent his country sliding further into chaos.
A coordinated series of bomb blasts and shooting sprees mostly targeting
police stations on Friday sent panicked residents of Nigeria's second
biggest city of more than 10 million people running for cover. The scale of the carnage makes this by far the deadliest strike claimed
by Boko Haram, a shadowy Islamist sect that started out as a clerical
movement opposed to western education but has become the biggest
security menace facing Africa's top oil producer. "We have 178 people killed in the two main hospitals," the senior doctor
in Kano's Murtala Mohammed hospital said following Friday's attacks,
citing records from his own and the other main hospital of Nasarawa. "There could be more, because some bodies have not yet come in and
others were collected early." The streets were quiet on Sunday in Kano, a vast metropolis of wide
paved highways, normally buzzing with motorbikes, and sandy alleyways
where hawkers sell grilled meat and donkeys pull carts heaped with fruit
and vegetables. Churches, which would usually be filled with worshippers in the
religiously mixed city, were largely empty. Jonathan, a Christian from the south, travelled to Kano on Sunday,
visiting hospitals to speak to victims. "Our coming today is to express our condolence to the good people of
Kano over the dastardly acts," Jonathan said at the palace of the Emir,
the city's Muslim figurehead. "Those causing havoc will never succeed ... The federal government will
not rest until the perpetrators are brought to book. We will not rest
until these terrorist are wiped out," said Jonathan, wearing a
traditional northern Nigerian kaftan and hat. Boko Haram has been blamed for killing hundreds of people in
increasingly sophisticated bombings and shootings, mostly targeting
security forces, establishment figures and more recently Christians, in
the country of 160 million people split roughly evenly between them and
Muslims. MORE ATTACKS ON SUNDAY Apart from a handful of forays into the capital Abuja, the sect's
energies have been concentrated in the majority Muslim north, far from
the oil producing facilities along the southern coast that keep Africa's
second biggest economy afloat. A further 10 people were killed on Sunday in Bauchi state, which
neighbours Kano, when police fought gunmen attempting to rob a bank, the
police said. Boko Haram robbed several banks last year to fund its
insurgency. "In the early hours of today gunmen killed 10 people at a military
checkpoint and a nearby hotel at Tafawa Balewa local government area,"
police commissioner Ikechukwu Aduba told Reuters. "One police officer, an army corporal and eight civilians (were killed)
after gunmen were earlier repelled from robbing a bank." Explosions also struck two churches in Bauchi on Sunday, witnesses said,
destroying one of them completely, although there were no immediate
reports of casualties. The government has announced a dusk-to-dawn curfew in Kano, an ancient
city that was once part of an Islamic caliphate trading riches on
caravan routes connecting sub-Saharan Africa with the Mediterranean. Jonathan, who helped broker a deal that largely ended an insurgency by
militants in the oil-rich southeast in 2009, has been criticised for
failing to grasp the gravity of the crisis unfolding in the north, and
of treating it as a pure security issue that will fizzle out by itself. Worsening insecurity has led some to question whether Nigeria isn't
sliding into civil war, 40 years after the secessionist Biafra conflict
killed over a million people, though few think an all-out war splitting
the country into two or more pieces is a likely outcome. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned the attacks and called for
"swift and transparent investigations" into the killings. European
powers and the African Union have also condemned the attacks. SECT CHANGING Boko Haram became active around 2003 in the remote, northeastern state
of Borno, on the threshold of the Sahara, but its attacks have spread
into other northern states, including Yobe, Kano, Bauchi and Gombe. Boko Haram, a Hausa term meaning "Western education is sinful", is
loosely modelled on Afghanistan's Taliban, but analysts say the anger it
channels reflects a perception that the north has been marginalised from
oil riches concentrated in the south. The sect originally said it wanted sharia, Islamic law, to be applied
more widely across Nigeria but its aims appear to have changed. Recent
messages from its leaders have said it is attacking anyone who opposes
it, at present mainly police, the government and Christian groups. "Since 2009 it is an insurgency that has gathered pace almost in slow
motion, incrementally - apparently absorbed and accommodated with no
clear evidence that government has the capacity, competence or will to
turn the tide," said Antony Goldman, head of Nigeria-focused PM Consulting. "Boko Haram was a work in progress when (former President) Obasanjo, who
had a deserved 'no nonsense' reputation, was in power; and it was
Yar'Adua, a Muslim President, who ordered a bloody crackdown in 2009. It
was a difficult inheritance for Jonathan but the problems have only
grown more complex." Boko Haram's attacks have become increasingly deadly in the last few months. At least 65 people were killed in the northeast Nigerian city of
Damaturu, Yobe state, in a spate of gun and bomb attacks in November. A bomb attack on a Catholic church just outside the capital Abuja on
Christmas Day, claimed by Boko Haram, killed 37 people and wounded 57. In a Reuters interview in late December, National Security Adviser
General Owoye Andrew Azazi said officials are considering making contact
with moderate members of shadowy sect via "back channels", even though
explicit talks are officially ruled out.
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