Johannesburg – A female suicide bomber died when she detonated explosives on her body after she was attacked by a guard dog in Nigeria’s north-eastern Borno state as she attempted to enter a hall where a wedding ceremony was taking place.
The dog, which died as the teenager detonated the Improvised Explosive Device (IED), saved the lives of numerous people on Sunday night at the Belbelo community centre in the Jere local government area, Sahara Reporters reported.
The incident follows another two suicide bombing attacks earlier the same day, reportedly carried out by Boko Haram militants. In the first incident two male suicide bombers detonated IEDs strapped to their bodies at a petrol station in Maiduguri, in Borno State, in the early hours of Sunday morning.
Nobody was killed in the attack except the two men. But in a simultaneous attack around the same time, one person was injured in the Jere area when a man detonated the IED strapped to his body, killing himself.
Meanwhile, news of more kidnappings of school girls filtered in last Thursday with reports that 18 girls, aged 17 and under, were kidnapped by Boko Haram after a raid on the village of Pulka near the border with Cameroon.
A Pulka community leader, who asked not to be named out of fear of reprisals, told the AFP by phone that members of the militant group arrived in pickup vans and seized the girls as terrified residents fled into the bush outside the village.
“The attackers were loyal to the faction headed by Abu Musab Al Barnawi, the son of Boko Haram founder, Mohammed Yusuf,” the community leader stated. Barnawi was appointed last year by the Islamic State group to replace leader Abubakar Shekau, who had pledged allegiance to the Middle East jihadist group in 2015.
In the second kidnapping outside the village of Dumba, close to Lake Chad, the jihadists killed a herdsman who had tried to escape after refusing to pay protection money, before abducting four women from the man’s family.
There is a strong possibility that the girls will end up as brides for the militants, similar to the mass kidnapping in 2014 when over 200 Nigerian school girls were abducted by Boko Haram, with some forced to marry their kidnappers after ending up pregnant. In recent weeks the militants have intensified their raids in areas near Lake Chad, stealing food and killing a number of civilians accused of cooperating with the Nigerian military.