Post date: Aug 26, 2011 12:25:5 PM
The U.N. in Switzerland confirms a bombing at its Abuja office in Nigeria, but says it has no further information on the blast.
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND (AUGUST 26, 2011) REUTERS -
The United Nations (U.N.) in Geneva has confirmed a bombing at its premises in the Nigerian capital Abuja.
The blast ripped through the U.N. offices on Friday (August 26) as a car rammed into the building, and witnesses said they had seen a number of dead bodies being carried from the site.
One medical officer said there were ten bodies and there could be more.
A security source in Abuja said he suspected an attack either by Boko Haram, a Nigerian radical Islamist sect, or the North African arm of al Qaeda. Boko Haram's attacks are growing in intensity and spreading further afield.
The U.N. building was blacked from top to bottom and the remains of a car had fallen into the basement. Soldiers, firefighters and rescue workers swarmed the area.
A police spokesman in Abuja said they had deployed officers to the scene, including an anti-bomb squad.
Ocilaje Michael, a member of the U.N. staff working at the Abuja building, said he had seen a number of dead bodies after the explosion.
The U.N.'s information director in Geneva, Corinne Momal-Vanian, gave the organisation's first official reaction, as the news came through.
"The only thing that we can confirm at this point is that our information officer in Lagos has confirmed that there was a bombing at the U.N. premises in Abuja. We have no indication at this moment of the number of casualties, if any. We do not know how much the building was damaged and what type of bomb it was. We can only confirm that there was a bombing at the U.N. building in Abuja," she told Reuters.
Boko Haram, whose name translates from the local northern Hausa language as "Western education is sinful", has been behind almost daily bombings and shootings, mostly targeting police in the northeast of Africa's most populous nation.
On Thursday (August 25) Boko Haram bombed a police station and raided banks in a northeastern Nigerian town, leaving 12 people dead including policemen and a soldier.
Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb operates in neighbouring Niger and has kidnapped foreign workers there. However, it was also suspected of kidnapping a Briton and an Italian in Nigeria earlier this year.
In December 2007, a car bombing at the U.N. building in Algiers killed at least 41 people, among them 17 U.N. staff. In 2003, 15 staff and seven others were killed by a bomb attack at the U.N. building in Baghdad.