Suicide bombers kill at least three in northeast Nigeria

N’DJAMENA: Chadian security forces killed six militants and lost five officers as they stormed an illegal arms cache east of the capital, the state prosecutor said on Monday. That attack by suspected Boko Haram militants on two police offices was the largest of its kind in Chad.

The apparently synchronized attacks were the most deadly that Western ally Chad has known and killed 34 people.

According to the Chad’s Minister of Public Security, Abderahim Bireme Hamid, the mastermind of the network had been detained yesterday.

“When we arrived on the scene at 5am our forces came across the… terrorists who blew themselves up”. The torso of one of the dead lay in the sand outside the house.

Before the raid, Chad’s chief prosecutor announced, “the dismantling of a Boko Haram cell and the arrest of 60 people” as part of an inquiry into the suicide bombings.

Boko Haram says Western-style democracy has brought only corruption and inequality to oil-rich but impoverished Nigeria and that only Islamic rule offers a just solution in the country of about 170 million people nearly equally divided between Christians and Muslims. Shekau is the militant group’s overall leader.

Good spirited Nigerians have been visiting the Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) camp run by the global Christian Centre for Missions in Uhogua, Edo State, to show their love and solidarity with the victims of the Boko Haram insurgency in the north-east who are taking refuge at the camp.

Boko Haram controlled territory the size of Belgium in the northeast at the start of the year but has been pushed out of most of it by the Nigerian army, backed by troops from Chad, Niger and Cameroon.