A bomb worn by a girl aged about 10 exploded in a busy marketplace in the northeastern Nigerian city of Maiduguri on Saturday, killing at least 16 people and injuring more than 20, security sources said.
“The explosive devices were wrapped around her body and the girl looked no more than 10 years old,” a police source said.
Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state, lies in the heartland of an insurgency by Sunni Muslim militant group Boko Haram, and is often hit by bomb attacks.
A Nigerian security source said the bomb went off at 12:15pm. The bodies of at least 16 bomb victims were counted in one hospital by mid-afternoon, civilian joint task force member Zakariya Mohammed said.
“Right now, there are 27 injured people in Borno Medical Hospital, while more were taken to other hospitals,” he said.
Five-year insurgency
The northeast states of Borno, Yobe and Adamawa are bearing the brunt of a five-year-old insurgency by Boko Haram, which wants to revive a medieval caliphate in Nigeria - Africa's most populous country and its biggest energy producer.
Last year more than 10,000 people died in the bloodshed.
About 130 km (80 miles) away in the Yobe state capital Damaturu, the army managed to repel an Islamist militant attack on Friday evening, but not before considerable damage was caused in the area, a Reuters reporter in the city and witnesses said.
The Reuters witness saw a number of burnt buildings, including the police area command station and a mosque in the Abacha market, along with several shops.
No casualty figures were immediately available and the militants took their dead away with them. Damaturu was last attacked in early December when air strikes were needed to halt advancing militants.
On Saturday afternoon, two suicide bombers, arrested by police in a vehicle, blew themselves up when they were taken to the main police station in the town of Potiskum in Yobe state, residents who witnessed the scene said.
There was no immediate word on casualties.
National ballot
The Boko Haram revolt is seen as the gravest security threat facing Nigeria, a country of 170 million people, and a headache for President Goodluck Jonathan, who is seeking re-election in a national ballot set for February 14th next.
Meanwhile, hundreds of bodies remain strewn in the bush in Nigeria after an attack that Amnesty International suggested is the deadliest massacre in the history of Boko Haram.
Mike Omeri, the government spokesman on the insurgency, said fighting continued yesterday for Baga, a town on the border with Chad where insurgents seized a key military base on January 3rd and attacked again on Wednesday.
“Security forces have responded rapidly, and have deployed significant military assets and conducted airstrikes against militant targets,” he said.
District head Baba Abba Hassan said most victims are children, women and elderly people who could not run fast enough when insurgents drove into Baga, firing rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles on residents.
‘Human carnage’
"The human carnage perpetrated by Boko Haram terrorists in Baga was enormous," Muhammad Abba Gava, a spokesman for poorly armed civilians in a defence group that fights Boko Haram, said.
He said the civilian fighters gave up on trying to count all the bodies: “No one could attend to the corpses and even the seriously injured ones who may have died by now.”
Amnesty International said there are reports the town was razed and as many as 2,000 people killed.
If true, "this marks a disturbing and bloody escalation of Boko Haram's ongoing onslaught," said Daniel Eyre, Nigeria researcher for Amnesty International.
US state department spokesman Jen Psaki condemned the attacks.
“We urge Nigeria and its neighbours to take all possible steps to address the urgent threat of Boko Haram,” she said.
“Even in the face of these horrifying attacks, terrorist organisations like Boko Haram must not distract Nigeria from carrying out credible and peaceful elections that reflect the will of the Nigerian people.”
The previous bloodiest day in the uprising involved soldiers gunning down unarmed detainees freed in a March 14th, 2014, attack on Giwa military barracks in Maiduguri city.
Amnesty said then that satellite imagery indicated more than 600 people were killed that day.
More than a million people have been displaced inside Nigeria and hundreds of thousands have fled across its borders into Chad, Cameroon and Nigeria.
Children separated
Emergency workers said this week they are having a hard time coping with scores of children separated from their parents in the chaos of Boko Haram’s increasingly frequent and deadly attacks.
Just seven children have been reunited with parents in Yola, capital of Adamawa state, where about 140 others have no idea if their families are alive or dead, said Sa’ad Bello, the co-ordinator of five refugee camps in Yola.
He said he was optimistic more reunions will come as residents return to towns that the military has retaken from extremists in recent weeks.
Suleiman Dauda, 12, said he ran into the bushes with neighbours when extremists attacked his village, Askira Uba, near Yola last year.
“I saw them kill my father, they slaughtered him like a ram. And up until now I don’t know where my mother is,” he told AP at Daware refugee camp in Yola.
Agencies