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Deadly double bombing strikes Nigeriaâ€™s Jos

12 December 2014 04:21 (UTC +04:00)

The blasts occurred shortly after 6.00pm (1700 GMT) at the commercial Terminus Market area of the religiously divided city.

“I saw a flash of light and heard a loud boom. Afterwards there was debris everywhere and mutilated bodies. I counted 32,” witness Tanko Mohammed told Reuters.

Other witnesses said one blast went off at an outdoor food stand and the other at the market’s entrance. They spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

It was initially hoped the death toll would be low as the bombings at a relatively quiet time of day, but as rescue workers moved in it became clear that was not the case.

"The bodies recovered so far are 31 but rescue workers are at the scene and the figures may change," said Pam Ayuba, the spokesman for area Governor Jonah Jang, told the AFP news agency.

The attack bears a resemblance to May’s twin car bombing in the same area of the city, suspected to have been carried out by the Islamic militant group Boko Haram.

Jos sits on a volatile fault line dividing Nigeria’s mainly Muslim north from the predominantly Christian south and has been a flashpoint for religious violence in the past.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for Thursday’s attack but it bore all the signs of Boko Haram, which has been waging a five-year insurgency to establish an Islamist state in the northeast of the country.

Police arrest teenage would-be suicide bomber

Separately on Thursday, police in northern Kano, Nigeria’s second largest city, arrested a teenage girl wearing a jacket primed with explosives, according to an officer who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorised to give information to reporters.

Security forces in the city also safely detonated a bomb hidden in a handbag planted in a supermarket favored by foreigners, Kano’s police commissioner Aderenle Shinaba told reporters.

Several bombs in recent months have been detonated by female suicide bombers, raising fears that Boko Haram is using some of the hundreds of kidnapped girls and young women for its attacks.

Twin bomb blasts killed at least 102 people at the main mosque in Kano on November 29, when gunmen also shot at people trying to escape.

At least 75 people have been killed in bomb blasts by female suicide bombers in recent weeks in Maiduguri, the northeastern capital of Borno state that is the birthplace of Boko Haram.

The extremist group has taken over several towns and villages along the northeast border with Cameroon, where it has declared an Islamic caliphate.