Bombs and shootings, dead and wounded people, desperation and tears.
The population hit by Muslim fundamentalists’ attacks on Christmas (forty-four dead) and in January (one-hundred and eighty-five killed), continues to die from fundamentalist violence.
According to Ignatius Kaigama, archbishop of the diocese of Jos on the border with Kaduna, interviewed by IlSussidiario.net, “we did not need American experts to forecast that on Easter there would be an attack in a Nigerian church.
The region is full of explosives which have arrived overland, via the sea and also from the sky with the single purpose of being used against the Christians. And, as the president himself declared, the terrorists are infiltrated in the government, in the police and in the army.”
There has been no official claiming of responsibility but the authorities are convinced that behind the car-bomb exploded yesterday in Kaduna (north) near a church while a religious function was underway, are elements of the fundamentalist schism Boko Haram, tied to the terrorists of al Qaida. The last official death toll counts thirty-six dead and about fifty wounded, of which at least thirteen in serious conditions.
Boko Haram is also considered responsible for the three separate attacks in the Muslim majority northern States of Yobe and Borno that, between yesterday evening and today, have left seven more dead, a few attackers among them. This series of coordinated attacks does not have a religious matrix but is the expression of a strategy of destabilization of the government of President Goodluck Jonathan.
In order for the fundamentalist Muslims to achieve their main objective (the establishment of Muslim Sharia law in all of Nigeria) the president, a Christian, needs to be put in a very difficult position.
The authorities have reported that in the States of Yobe and Borno, a police station, a bank, a hotel and a building of the Public Administration “have been attacked and given to the flames”. At the same time a politician, a police sergeant and his little six-year-old daughter, found defenseless in their house in Putiskum, were killed. The soldiers at a traffic control post in Maiduguri defended themselves successfully by engaging in a shootout.
In Kano, the largest city in the north, the army has defused an explosive device found in a parked vehicle right in the city center. Last January 20th, the metropolis had been the theater of a series of attacks that had provoked one-hundred and eighty-five deaths.
In the meantime, the dynamics of the Kaduna massacre seem to have been clarified.
A suicide bomber attempted to take his explosive car to the entrance of a church but, after being stopped at a traffic control post, he went back and set off the explosive close to another religious building, among a myriad of moto-taxis parked waiting for the people who were still participating in the Easter Mass.
Other cars caught fire and were destroyed, which created the illusion of the presence of a second car-bomb.