Two suicide bombers targeted a mobile
phone market in the northern Nigerian city of
Kano on Wednesday, killing at least 15
people and injuring more than 100 others,
emergency officials said.
The attack came less than 24 hours after
another suicide bomber killed at least 34
people and injured 80 others in Yola, a
northeastern city where many refugees from
Nigeria’s uprising reside.
There was no immediate claim of
responsibility for any of the attacks, but
suspicion fell on the armed group Boko
Haram, whose six-year insurgency has killed
an estimated 20,000 people and forced 2.3
million to flee their homes.
Boko Haram on Wednesday was named the
world's most deadly extremist group in the
Global Terrorism Index, published by the
Institute for Economics and Peace. Deaths
attributed to Boko Haram increased by 317
percent in 2014 to 6,644 compared to 6,073
blamed on the Islamic State in Iraq and the
Levant (ISIL). Boko Haram pledged allegiance
to ISIL in March and calls itself that group's
West Africa Province.
Wednesday's explosions came as President
Muhammadu Buhari pressed his campaign
against Nigeria's endemic corruption, blamed
for hampering the fight against the
insurgents. Buhari accused his predecessor's
national security adviser of stealing billions
of dollars meant to buy weapons to fight
Boko Haram, when soldiers had just a few
bullets and the armed group was rampaging
across northeast Nigeria.
Critics have long blamed corruption for the
military's failures, asking how the insurgents
can be better armed than Nigerian soldiers
despite an annual defense budget of more
than $5 billion, supplemented last year by a
loan of $1 billion.
Buhari on Wednesday ordered the arrests of
several former high-ranking officials allegedly
linked to fraudulent and fictitious arms
contracts totaling $5.4 billion, one of his
advisers, Femi Adesina, said in a statement.
"Thousands of needless Nigerian deaths
would have been avoided" if the money had
been properly spent, Adesina said.
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