Nigeria violence: Many feared dead in Abuja bus blasts

Many people are feared dead after two blasts rocked a crowded bus station on the outskirts of Nigeria’s capital, Abuja.

The blast happened as commuters were about to board buses and taxis to go to work in central Abuja, the BBC’s Haruna Tangaza reports. Eyewitnesses say there are dead bodies scattered around the area.

This may have been another attack by the Islamist militant group known as Boko Haram, correspondents say.

Eyewitness Badamsi Nyanya told the BBC he had seen 40 bodies being evacuated.

“This morning there was an explosion at the Nyanya Motor Park,” Manzo Ezekiel of the National Emergency Management Agency said.

Rescue teams are on the ground, he added. Ambulances have been taking the injured to nearby hospitals.

Eyewitness Mimi Daniels, who works in Abuja, said: “I was waiting to get on a bus when I heard a deafening explosion then smoke,” she told Reuters.

“People were running around in panic.”

‘Terrible’

Another eyewitness told the BBC: “I have never seen [anything] like that in my life. It was just terrible… We were just running helter-skelter. So somehow I think that they planted something inside one of the buses there.

“So there are many dead shot down at the scene of the accident. And as you can see now some of these casualties… we are hoping, we are praying they will be ok. We saw some ambulances bringing corpses to other hospitals.”

He added it was difficult to estimate how many had been killed in the attack, but that there were many.

This year, Boko Haram’s fighters have killed more than 1,500 civilians in three states in north-east Nigeria, says the BBC’s Will Ross in Lagos.

Boko Haram has hit Abuja several times before, including an attack on the United Nations building in 2011.

The Nigerian government had said the violence was now contained in a small area of the north-east.

BBC News

UM– USEKE.RW