BAUCHI, Nigeria (AP) — A crowd beat to death a teenage girl accused
of planning to be a suicide bomber and then set her body ablaze Sunday,
according to police and witnesses at a northeastern Nigerian market.
A second suspect, also a teenage girl, was arrested at Muda Lawal, the biggest market in Bauchi city.
A
spate of suicide bombings has been blamed on Nigeria's home-grown Boko
Haram Islamic extremist group, which wants to enforce strict Islamic law
across Nigeria. The group has threatened to disrupt Nigeria's March 28
presidential and legislative elections, saying democracy is a corrupt
Western concept.
In Bauchi, the two girls aroused suspicion by
refusing to be searched when they arrived at the gate to the vegetable
market, said yam vendor Mohd Adamu. People overpowered one girl and
discovered she had two bottles strapped to her body, he said. They
clubbed her to death, put a tire doused in fuel over her head and set it
on fire, he said.
It seems doubtful the girl was actually a
bomber as she did not detonate any explosives when she was attacked,
said Police Deputy Superintendent Mohammad Haruna. He described her as
the victim of "mob action carried out by an irate crowd."
Recently
some girls as young as 10 years old have been used to carry explosives
that detonated in busy markets and bus stations, raising fears that Boko
Haram may be using some of its hundreds of kidnap victims in bomb
attacks. It's unclear whether such girls detonate explosives themselves
or whether the bombs are controlled remotely.
President Goodluck
Jonathan last week condemned the Boko Haram insurgents for choosing soft
targets and said the series of bombings are a response to the Nigerian
military's recent success in seizing back a score of towns that had been
in the hands of the extremists for months.
A multinational
military force including Nigeria's neighbors is being formed to stop
Boko Haram's attacks outside Nigeria's borders.
Some 10,000 people
died in Nigeria from Boko Haram's violence last year, compared to 2,000
in the first four years, according to the U.S. Council on Foreign
Relations, and some 1.5 million people have been driven from their
homes.
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