Suicide bomber kills scores during prayers at crowded mosque in Nigeria

The New York Times

ABUJA, Nigeria — A suicide bomber set off explosives on Tuesday during morning prayers in a small, crowded mosque in northeastern Nigeria in a deadly attack that comes amid a raft of similar assaults on rural communities in the region.

Othman Abubakar, a spokesman for the police in Adamawa State, where the attack took place, said at least 50 people had been killed. Late in the day Tuesday the national emergency management agency said it had confirmed 23 deaths. Other officials could not confirm the death toll but blamed Boko Haramfor the blast.

President Muhammadu Buhari issued a statement calling the attack “very cruel and dastardly.”

Boko Haram, a radical Islamist group that has waged war for the past eight years in Nigeria and in neighboring countries, has dispatched suicide bombers in a wave of attacks in the past year on mosques, checkpoints, markets and even camps for some of the nearly 2 million people uprooted from their homes because of the conflict.

Most of those bombers, many of whom are women and children, have been sent to attack Maiduguri, which is the capital of the Nigerian state of Borno and was the city where the Boko Haram movement was founded. But recently, assaults also have been carried out in towns and villages across the countryside and in small settlements in neighboring countries.

The attack on Tuesday took place in Mubi, not far from the border with Cameroon. Mubi, home to a top state university, is among a number of towns and villages where Boko Haram fighters once held control. But security forces ousted the militants three years ago, and the area has been relatively calm for months. Boko Haram’s recent attacks in the state had taken place farther to the north.