- Title: NIGERIA: Protest in Nigeria over abducted girls, increased violence
- Date: 21st May 2014
- Summary: NEWSPAPER HEADLINE READING (English): "BLOODY DAY IN JOS"
- Embargoed: 5th June 2014 13:00
- Keywords:
- Location: Nigeria
- Country: Nigeria
- Topics: General
- Reuters ID: LVAD2BB34GP62AQNIWHS0OBIZIX1
- Story Text: Demonstrators called for the end of a spate of violence in Nigeria's north as they protested in the capital Abuja on Wednesday (May 21).
Suspected Nigerian Islamist militants killed 17 people in a remote northeastern village on Tuesday (May 20) night, hours after a bomb killed 118 people in the central city of Jos, on Wednesday.
Militants opened fire on Alagarno village and razed several houses to the ground, a source at police headquarters told Reuters. The attack was barely 30 km (20 miles) from Chibok, where Boko Haram Islamists abducted more than 200 schoolgirls last month.
More than one hundred protesters gathered in Abuja on Wednesday, many of them questioning the government's handling of the recent violence.
Executive director at the Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre, Awwal Musa Rafranjani, said he believed there was something wrong with the country's security network.
"The level of insecurity or the increase in insecurity in Nigeria is very alarming especially... given the fact that every state, every town in Nigeria is mounted by the so called JTF (Joint Task Force) and road block as well as, police and army checkpoint everywhere, and yet... you hear the increase of bombing, kidnapping and... robbery and all sorts of criminal activities going on. This suggests that there is something fundamentally wrong with our security network," he said.
Boko Haram attracted international headlines when they abducted the schoolgirls on April 14 from Chibok, and some protesters were shocked that despite this, an attack was still possible nearby.
"Can you tell me the reason why the same Chibok, the same Chibok that the whole world is mentioning the name as a result of abduction of two hundred and seventy something girls from that same, yet they are experiencing another attack, and you tell me there is a state of emergency, you tell me there is need for extension of state of emergency, and you tell me yet there are troops deployed there," said protester Ibrahim Garba Wala.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for either of the attacks, but Boko Haram has either claimed or been blamed for scores of similar attacks in that part of Borno state, near the hilly border with Cameroon.
In the past two months, the group has redoubled its five-year-old violent campaign to carve an Islamic state out of religiously-mixed Nigeria.
Bomb attacks are growing more frequent and sophisticated, including two on the capital last month, and massacres of helpless villagers are an almost daily occurrence.
The Jos attack, if it was Boko Haram, showed how the group was spreading outwards from the northeast. Though it was not the first attack in Jos, it was by far the deadliest. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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