Boko Haram suspected in deadly bombing

KANO, Nigeria — A suicide car bomber killed five people on a street of popular bars and restaurants in the northern Nigerian city of Kano yesterday evening, in an area mostly inhabited by southern Christians, police said.

Kano police spokesman Musa Majiya said the bomber struck Gold Coast Street in the Sabon Gari, or “foreign quarter,” of the north’s biggest city.

“I heard a loud blast. And there was a lot of smoke. Soldiers came in to cordon off the place and ambulances were rushing people to hospital,” witness Abdul Dafar, who lives a block away from the blast, said. He added that he had seen four bodies in the aftermath.

There was no claim of responsibility, but blame is likely to fall on the violent Islamist group Boko Haram, whose struggle against the Nigerian state has killed thousands over the last five years.

The militants also operate in neighboring Niger, Cameroon and Chad, and President Goodluck Jonathan described them as West Africa’s al-Qaida on Saturday in Paris, where regional leaders met France’s President Francois Hollande to discuss how to tackle the growing threat posed by the group.

The Islamists grabbed world headlines with the abduction of more than 200 school girls a month ago from a remote village in the northeast. Britain, the United States and France have pledged to help rescue them.

Boko Haram has frequently attacked Sabon Gari, whose liquor stores are also a cause of friction with Kano’s Islamic police. The area has for decades housed ethnic Igbo traders from the South, who are predominantly Christian.

Nigeria’s population of 170 million is split roughly evenly between Christians and Muslims.

Bombs in Sabon Gari killed at least 15 people in July, and an attack on a bus station there in March 2013 killed 25.

The focus of Boko Haram’s insurgency is on the northeast border area with Cameroon, where it has repeatedly attacked military outposts and massacred villagers with growing ferocity.

But two bombs on the outskirts of the capital Abuja last month that killed 105 people between them showed the Islamists can strike across north and central Nigeria.