Scores killed in Nigeria

At least 81 people have been killed and 150 others injured after two bombs exploded outside the central mosque of the Nigerian city of Kano.

Friday’s attacks occurred outside the Emir’s palace mosque just as residents were packing into the area for prayers, police said.

Witnesses said they heard gunshots but did not know who was shooting.

“Two bombs exploded, one after the other, in the premises of the Grand Mosque just seconds after the prayers had started,” Aminu Abdullahi, a local resident, said, adding that a third went off nearby.

The AFP news agency put the death toll at 120.
Al Jazeera’s Rawya Rageh, reporting from Yola in nearby Adamawa state, said the blasts struck the centre of Kano, northern Nigeria’s biggest city.

“It was a very brazen attack in the centre of the city. The crowds at the mosque are usually the largest in the city during Friday prayers,” she said.

Palace officials have said Emir Muhammad Sanusi II, one of the highest ranking Islamic figures in Nigeria, is currently out of the country.

The blasts came after a bomb attack was foiled against a mosque in the northeastern city of Maiduguri earlier on Friday, five days after two female suicide bombers killed over 45 people in the city.

Emmanuel Ojukwu, a national police spokesman, told AFP news agency that the bombers blew themselves up in quick succession, then “gunmen opened fire on those who were trying to escape”.

Ojukwu said he did not know whether the suicide bombers were male or female, and did not give an exact figure on the number of attackers. But he said an angry mob killed four of the shooters in the chaotic aftermath.

Witnesses in the city said they were set on fire.

An AFP reporter at the Murtala Mohammed Specialist Hospital morgue counted 92 bodies, most of them men and boys with blast injuries and severe burns.

As night fell, hundreds of people were desperately trying to use the lights on their mobile phones to identify loved ones.