Bomb blasts kill dozens in Nigeria, Cameroon

Nigerian president blames U.S. refusal to sell arms on losing battle to Boko Haram

LAGOS, NIGERIA— Bomb blasts blamed on Boko Haram killed 29 people in Nigeria and 24 in Cameroon, officials said Thursday after Nigeria’s new president warned that the U.S. refusal to sell his country strategic weapons is “aiding and abetting” the Islamic extremist group.

Nigeria’s National Emergency Management Agency called Thursday for urgent blood donations to treat 105 wounded people, according to spokesman Sani Datti.

He said at least 29 bodies have been recovered at two bustling bus stations in northeastern Gombe town — the latest targets in a campaign that has spilled across Nigeria’s borders.

In neighbouring Cameroon, two suicide bombers Wednesday killed at least 22 people at a marketplace near the border, officials said. The toll is likely to rise among the 50 injured, they said. Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari returned home Thursday to the capital, Abuja, from a four-day visit to the United States where he was warmly received by President Barack Obama, but failed to get all he wanted.

“Buhari returns to Abuja, with no weapons sale from USA,” said a headline in Nigeria’s the News.

Buhari told policy-makers at the U.S. Institute for Peace on Wednesday that Nigeria’s armed forces are “largely impotent” because they do not possess the appropriate weapons to fight Boko Haram.

He urged the U.S. president, Congress and the government to find ways around the Leahy law that prohibits sales of certain weapons to countries whose military are accused of gross human rights violations.

Amnesty International says Nigeria’s military is responsible for the deaths of 8,000 detainees — twice as many as Boko Haram’s victims in the first four years of its six-yearold insurgency. “The application of the Leahy law . . . has aided and abetted the Boko Haram terrorist group in the prosecution of its extremist ideology and hate, the indiscriminate killings and maiming of civilians, in raping of women and girls and in their other heinous crimes,” Buhari said.