At least 10 die in car bomb attack on Nigeria U.N. HQ
Baku, August 26 (AZERTAC). A car bomb ripped through the United Nations’ headquarters in the Nigerian capital of Abuja on Friday, killing at least 10 people, security sources and witnesses said.
They said the car rammed into the office building before exploding in an attack similar a June assault on the Abuja police headquarters claimed by Boko Haram, a Nigerian radical Islamist sect.
"We have had 10 dead and there could be more," said a medical official who declined to give his name.
The U.N. building was blackened from top to bottom and the remains of a car had fallen into the basement. Soldiers, firefighters and rescue workers swarmed over the area.
An Abuja-based security source said he suspected the attack was carried out by a Nigerian Islamist group, whose strikes have been growing in intensity and spreading further afield, or the North African arm of al Qaeda.
This year`s presidential election in Nigeria was seen as the fairest since the end of military rule but it left Africa`s most populous country starkly divided between the mostly Muslim north and the largely Christian south.
Militant attacks in the oil-producing regions of the south have subsided but the north has been hit by a round of bombings and killings by Islamist extremists, prompting fears violence could spread.
Ocilaje Michael, a member of the U.N. staff working at the Abuja building, said he had seen a number of dead bodies after the explosion.
Boko Haram, whose name translates from the local northern Hausa language as "Western education is sinful," has been behind almost daily bombings and shootings, mostly targeting police in the northeast of Africa`s most populous nation.
The group claimed responsibility for a June bomb attack on the car park of the Abuja police headquarters which bore similarities to Friday`s blast at the U.N. building.
In that attack, a car rammed through the gates of the police headquarters in the capital and exploded, killing the bomber and narrowly missing the chief of police.
On Thursday, Boko Haram bombed a police station and raided banks in a northeastern Nigerian town, leaving 12 people dead including policemen and a soldier.
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