By Bala Adamu
KANO, Nigeria (Reuters) – Nigerian forces raided the
hideout of Islamist militants in Kano on Tuesday, killing the suspected mastermind of an attack on Christian worshippers, in
a gun battle that lasted several hours in the main northern city.
The raid followed a spate of attacks in the past days, believed to be by Islamist sect Boko Haram,
which killed 30 people and dampened hopes that tighter security in the north had drastically reduced the sect’s
capability.
Residents of the Bubugaje slum area of Kano awoke to several loud explosions and the sound of
gunfire.
“It is really terrifying … everyone is indoors,” said Anthonia Okafor, a student at Kano
university.
Hundreds have died in violence across the north and in the capital Abuja since the Islamists launched
their uprising in 2009, targeting authorities, security forces and more recently the north’s Christian minority.
“Our
men just raided one of the hideouts of the elements … where we discovered explosives and weapons,” said Lieutenant Iweha
Ikedichi, a spokesman for the Joint Task Force (JTF) in Kano, Nigeria’s second biggest city.
“The main suspect has
been killed,” he added, referring to the suspected mastermind of an attack on a university in Kano on Sunday, when gunmen
sprayed bullets in a lecture theatre being used for Christian worship.
That attack and another one on Sunday against a
church in northeast Maiduguri, Boko Haram’s spiritual headquarters, killed 19 people between them.
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Nigerian forces took journalists to the scene of the battle, a hot, dusty slum at the edge of a rusting
industrial estate. They brought out three women and two children they said had been rescued from the house, which was partly
demolished by fighting.
The front wall was blasted off; the iron roof, collapsed.
“The most difficult task we
face with these terrorists is they know us but we don’t know them. They’re not rooted in a particular place,” Kano army
commander Brigadier General Ilyasu Abba said, facing the house pocked with bullet and bomb craters.
“We have rooted
them out of here today, but tomorrow they could be somewhere else,” he said, adding that one suspect was arrested but two had
escaped through the back door.
SHADOWY SECT
Police Commissioner for Kano State Ibrahim Idris told Radio Nigeria
that AK-47 assault rifles, 467 munitions and 45 cans full of explosives were seized in the raid in Kano, an ancient Islamic
city once at the heart of the merchant caravan routes stretching across the Sahara from Africa’s interior to the
Mediterranean.
“Based on intelligence reports on the suspects’ hideout, a joint team comprising soldiers, police and
the State Security Service commenced that operation this morning,” he said.
Boko Haram says it is fighting to
reinstate a 19th century Islamic caliphate in Africa’s most populous nation, whose 160 million people are split roughly
evenly between Muslims and Christians along north-south lines.
Boko Haram’s attacks have replaced militancy in the
oil producing Niger Delta as the main security threat to the administration of President Goodluck Jonathan, a southern
Christian, and it has gained momentum since his election victory a year ago.
A bomb blast struck a police chief’s
convoy in previously peaceful eastern Taraba state on Monday, killing 11 people.
Suicide car bombers targeted the
offices of This Day newspaper in Abuja and in Kaduna last week, killing at least four people and demonstrating the sect’s
continued ability to carry out coordinated strikes.