Boko Haram's bombers hit Maiduguri, Cameroon

Monday, July 13, 2015 3:35 pm

*Insurgents also fire rockets into Cameroonian town of Fotokol

At least a dozen civilians and a Chadian soldier were killed in two suicide attacks by suspected Boko Haram militants in the northern Cameroon town of Fotokol late on Sunday, a senior Cameroonian military officer said today.

The first explosion went off inside a bar near a Cameroon special forces (BIR) camp just after sundown as many were breaking the Ramadan fast, the officer said, asking not to be named.

A man injured in a suicide blast is carried on a mattress by relatives at the General Hospital in northeast Nigerian town of Potiskum on January 12, 2015.

“The second explosion followed as soldiers approached the bar,” he said.

L’Oeil du Sahel, a newspaper in northern Cameroon, said the two attackers wore burqas.

L’Oeil du sahel also reported several rockets being fired into Fotokol by the insurgents from Gamboru in Nigeria. Several persons were killed, one of whom was the last doctor in the town.

“His body was found this morning near the hospital. He was the last doctor in that city”, the paper said in a post on its FaceBook Page.

Islamist group Boko Haram, which launched an insurgency six years ago to carve out an emirate in northeast Nigeria, has stepped up attacks in Nigeria, neighbouring Chad, Cameroon and Niger in recent months.

The group is suspected of launching a similar attack in Chad’s capital, about 60 km (37 miles) east of Fotokol, on Saturday. A man dressed in a woman’s burqa blew himself up in the main market killing 15 people.

In Maiduguri today, a suicide bomber in a bus killed one member of the civilian joint taskforce (JTF) at the main checkpoint on the outskirts of the city around midday on Monday, military and JTF sources said.

A JTF member at the scene said that after the passengers had left the bus the driver drove forward to another inspection point at the Njimtilo checkpoint in the southwest of the city where he detonated the bomb.

Three civilians were injured.

There was no immediate claim for the attack but it bore the hallmarks of Islamist militant group Boko Haram.

Maiduguri, the state capital of Borno, is the birthplace of the jihadi sect.