3 suicide bombers attack, kill only themselves

YAOUNDE: The UN Security Council has begun a west Africa visit to examine the threat posed by Boko Haram to countries most affected by the extremist group.

The diplomats were in Cameroon yesterday for meetings with top officials and an encounter with the multinational force that has been fighting the Nigeria-based group.

The delegation also plans to go to Chad and Niger, then move on to Nigeria, where they will visit a camp in the north of the country for people displaced by Boko Haram.

Ahead of the UN visit three suicide bombers killed themselves and set three fuel tankers ablaze in Maiduguri in Nigeria.

Soldiers fired at one of the bombers, a teenage girl, to avert what could have been a major attack on the city’s main fuel depot, according to the police chief and a witness at the scene.

“We are lucky. Today could have been another sad day for us in Maiduguri,” police commissioner Damian Chukwu told reporters at the scene, where firefighters were dousing several fires.

The attack, outside a petrol station opposite the north-east- er n headquarters of the Central Bank of Nigeria, killed only the three bombers, said Abdulkadir Ibrahim, spokesman for the National Emergency Management Agency.

An elderly woman bomber blew herself up beside a stationary tanker loaded with fuel around 3am, witness Mala Gajibo said.

She was accompanied by a teenage boy and girl who con- tinued down the road towards the fuel depot until they were challenged by soldiers, Gajibo said.

Chukwu also said soldiers fired at one of the bombers.

“They ordered them to stop but they chose to run,” Gajibo said.

“The male suicide bomber detonated his explosives near S Baba (gas) filling station, while the girl was shot at by the mil- itary and ran under a parked truck loaded with petrol products which went up in flames” when her explosives detonated.

The seven-year Boko Haram uprising has killed more than 20 000, left 2.6 million homeless and created what the UN has called the continent’s worst humanitarian crisis, with more than five million people in urgent need of food aid. – AP