The Boko Haram Group Claim The Bomb Blast

A radical Islamist sect in remote
northeastern Nigeria claimed
responsibility on Wednesday for
co-ordinated bombs that killed at
least 16 people hours after
President Goodluck Jonathan
was sworn in.
A spokesman for Boko Haram, a
militant group behind years of
attacks around the northeastern
city of Maiduguri, told the BBC
Hausa service it had planted the
bombs which tore through bars
in the towns of Bauchi, Zaria and
Zuba late on Sunday.
The spokesman, identified by the
BBC as Abu Zayd, told the radio
station, which broadcasts in
northern Nigeria, that the sect
did not believe in the Nigerian
constitution and repeated a call
for sharia (Islamic law) to be
more widely imposed.
"We are doing what we are
doing to fight injustice. If they
stop their satanic ways of doing
things and the injustices, we
would stop what we are doing,"
Zayd said.
Boko Haram's membership and
ideology are ill-defined and it
was not possible to verify Zayd's
claim of responsibility.
The Nigerian government and
security agencies have made no
public comment on who might
have been behind the attacks
beyond saying that
investigations are under way.
Bomb attacks in the north have
rapidly replaced militant raids on
oil facilities in the southern Niger
Delta as the main security threat
in Africa's most populous nation.
The style of Sunday's strikes,
targeting popular drinking dens,
one of them near a military
barracks, was similar to
bombings in Abuja on New
Year's Eve which killed at least 10
people. The perpetrators of that
attack have never been caught.
The views of Boko Haram, whose
name means "Western education
is sinful", are not espoused by
most of the country's Muslim
population, the largest in sub-
Saharan Africa.
It is unclear how many followers
the sect has but poverty,
unemployment and a lack of
education in the far northeast
have enabled its leaders to build
a cult-like following which is as
much violently anti-establishment
as fervently religious.
Sect members launched an
uprising in 2009, attacking
government buildings and
leading to days of gun battles
with the security forces in which
as many as 800 people were
killed.