Nigeria Mosque Targeted in Deadly Suicide Bombing
President Muhammadu Buhari issued a statement calling the attack "very cruel and dastardly." Boko Haram, a radical Islamist group
that has waged war for the past eight years in Nigeria and in neighboring countries, has dispatched suicide bombers in a wave of attacks in the past year on mosques, checkpoints, markets and even camps for some of the nearly two million people uprooted from their homes because of the conflict.
21, 2017
ABUJA, Nigeria — A suicide bomber set off explosives on Tuesday during morning prayers in a small, crowded mosque in northeastern Nigeria in a deadly attack
that comes amid a raft of similar assaults on rural communities in the region.
Most of those bombers, many of whom are women and children, have been sent to attack Maiduguri, which is the capital of the Nigerian state of Borno
and was the city where the Boko Haram movement was founded.
Photographs circulated by the online news organization Sahara Reporters,
and said to be from the attack in Mubi, showed blood smeared across a concrete room where charred marks radiated from a hole in the wall, and damaged beams hanging from a ceiling that appeared to have been blown apart.
Times journalists spent weeks documenting the stories of people living along a desert
highway in Niger, interviewing more than 100 residents scattered by Boko Haram.
Adamu Ngoshe, a 62-year-old who sells cigarettes at a market in Mubi, said he went to the mosque after hearing about the
blast to check on the father of a fellow market vendor who was visiting from out of town and staying near the mosque.