Suicide car bombing in Nigeria kills 38

Its target was unclear: The victims were of various religious and ethnic lines in

the violently divided nation.

By Jon Gambrell

Associated Press

KADUNA, Nigeria – The suicide

car bombing that killed at least 38 people in Nigeria claimed victims across its religious and ethnic lines, showing clearly

that everyone is at risk in this nation often violently divided against itself.

Young Muslim men of the Hausa Fulani

people of Nigeria’s north burned to death in Sunday’s blast, pinned under the weight of their motorcycle taxis. A passer-by

from Nigeria’s southwestern Yoruba people found himself thrown to the road in the explosion. The blast tore apart businesses

owned by Christian Igbo people of the nation’s southeast.

All those who spoke Monday said they wanted Nigeria’s weak

central government to stop the violence now spreading across the country, including attacks carried out by a radical Islamist

sect. However, authorities in the northeast said the sect known as Boko Haram had killed four people, as soldiers in the

northern city of Kano found another car bomb ready to explode.

“Who are they really fighting?” asked one woman while

looking over the scene of the Kaduna suicide attack on Monday, choking back a sob before walking away.

Sunday’s blast

struck the capital of Kaduna state, apparently after the suicide bomber turned away from attacking a church holding a morning

Easter service. The car exploded at a busy junction about 200 yards away, tearing apart makeshift restaurants made of

discarded lumber that were serving cheap rice patties to the city’s working poor.

The blast sent metal shards flying

in all directions that left bullet-like holes in buildings and killed several people, witnesses said. At a hotel near the

blast, the force of the bomb tore away the ceiling and blew out windows. A family staying just across from where the car

detonated walked away unharmed, manager Stephen Uka said.

“They checked out with their lives,” he said.

The

explosion also ignited black-market jerry cans full of gasoline, which spread a fire that consumed the group of motorcycle

taximen, witness Kunle Olowe said.

Those men burned to death as local people tried to pull them away, scorching their

own hands, Olowe said.

There was “no water to put them out,” Olowe said. Others blamed security agencies for taking

too long to respond in a city where soldiers have been on the street since election violence last year. Administrators at St.

Gerard’s Catholic Hospital, which took in some victims, said they didn’t have enough ambulances to ferry the

wounded.

Crowds gathered at the blast site Monday, looking on as a road crew used pickaxes to cut away the small

crater left by the bomb and concrete to repair the curb running alongside it.

Those gathered in small crowds nearby,

however, all seemed fixated on a choppy, mobile-phone video apparently taken immediately after the blast. It showed bleeding

victims crying out incoherently, the lifeless dead laying still on the debris-strewn road. One man, bloody, simply crawls

along the street unhelped as another slumps by an open sewer.

No one has claimed responsibility for the blast, though

suspicion immediately fell upon Boko Haram. Boko Haram, whose name means “Western education is sacrilege” in the Hausa

language of Nigeria’s north, is waging an increasingly bloody fight with security agencies and the public. More than 390

people have been killed in violence blamed on the sect this year alone, according to an Associated Press count.