Twin car bomb blasts at a bustling marketplace killed at least 51 people in Maiduguri, a Red Cross official said Sunday.
Many
more people are believed buried in rubble from the Saturday night
explosions that collapsed some buildings and set others aflame with
smoke billowing for hours, said the official, a resident who worked at
the scene through the night but insisted on anonymity because he is not
authorised to speak to reporters.
The victims include children
dancing at a wedding celebration and people watching a soccer match at
an outdoor cinema, survivors told The Associated Press on Sunday.
Fifty corpses were retrieved, said Hassan Ali, leader of an anti-terror vigilante group.
The
first blast came from a pickup truck carrying firewood and did not
cause many casualties, said Ali. Most of those killed had run to the
scene to help when a second explosion blasted from a passenger car, he
said.
Survivors said they captured a man who jumped out of the
car, grabbed a tricycle taxi and tried to make off. He was badly beaten
and taken to nearby Umaru Shehu General Hospital, where a security guard
said all the wounded brought in had died. Most survivors insisted on
anonymity for fear of reprisals.
Some bodies were blown apart,
said market trader Mallam Sumaila. An Associated Press reporter saw a
corpse burned beyond recognition at a hospital where wailing families
were collecting bodies for immediate burial, in the Muslim tradition.
The
attackers chose a densely populated area with narrow alleyways that
maximized the blasts and a Saturday night when the market was open late.
It was not known how many wounded are being treated in three hospitals in the city.
Military
and police officials did not immediately offer comment and there was no
claim of responsibility from Boko Haram, which communicates only
through occasional videos.
The attack is a major setback to a new
army and air force offensive against the Islamic uprising under new
commanders since President Goodluck Jonathan fired his entire military
command in January.
Since then, criticism and anger have grown as
attacks have increased and become ever deadlier: More than 300 people
were killed in February alone in the neighboring states of Adamawa and
Yobe.
Outnumbered soldiers are accused of abandoning checkpoints
and leaving civilians at the mercy of extremists in two attacks last
week that killed about 100 people, including one on a high school.
Maiduguri,
in Borno state, had suffered only two attacks in the past six months: a
January 14 bomb that killed about 40 people and a bold assault December
5 on the air force base and an army barracks on the outskirts in which
all five aircraft on the runway were destroyed.
Such attacks have
led to accusations by regional officials of collusion between some
military officers and the terrorist network.
Opposition politicians blame a failure of leadership by Jonathan.
The
Defense Ministry has blamed recent attacks on militants escaping aerial
bombardments and ground assaults to flush them from forest hideouts and
mountain caves along the Cameroon border. The military closed hundreds
of kilometers of border with Cameroon last week to stop extremists
escaping and using Cameroon soil to launch attacks.
Anger will be
fueled by reports that a military fighter jet targeting extremist
hideouts bombed a village in Yobe on Friday, killing 20.
The
military knew there were alleged terrorists in Maiduguri because they
reported Friday that they had killed 13 suspected extremists and
arrested several, including "some picked up in Maiduguri and environs."
