KANO, Nigeria - Nigerian police foiled fresh attacks in the northern city of Kano Monday, discovering eight bomb-laden cars and over 100 unexploded devices around sites attacked last week.
Clerics meantime said peace prayers after the attacks that killed over 166 people in the the country’s second-largest city and stoked fresh fears of an all-out civil war in Africa’s most populous nation and top oil producer.
President Goodluck Jonathan, facing the worst crisis of his nine-month tenure as he grapples with a surge in attacks by the Boko Haram and mounting social discontent, vowed to beef up security. Kano was left reeling after bombs were set off and gun battles raged in a wave of coordinated attacks after Friday prayers that targeted mainly police buildings.
“So far we have discovered over 100 home-made bombs in the operation we have launched in bomb recovery in different parts of the city,” said a senior police official on condition of anonymity.
He said “lots of the unexploded bombs were recovered around the police headquarters” which was one of the targets struck in the deadly Friday attacks. Earlier Monday police said they found eight explosive-laden cars abandoned by road sides across the city, including one near a police station and another in a market in a densely-populated area of the city.
“We are still facing serious security threats,” he said.
Jonathan said some suspects had been arrested and vowed that his government would strengthen security in Kano and elsewhere in the country and track down the backers of Boko Haram, which has staged a series of increasingly sophisticated and bloody attacks, often targeting Christians.
About 200 Muslim clerics and political leaders offered peace prayers in Kano, an ancient holy Muslim city of about 4.5 million people.
“I will pray to God that we should never re-live the catastrophe that resulted in the deaths and maiming in our city,” Kano State governor Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso said.
Nobel literature laureate Wole Soyinka appealed to fellow Nigerians to eschew reprisals in the face of the deadly attacks.
“We must not accept the agenda of Boko Haram. Do not consider reprisals, protect your neighbours” Soyinka said. “They (Boko Haram) want... to embark on a programme where neighbours will turn against neighbours.”
A purported spokesman for Boko Haram claimed responsibility for the attacks, saying they were in response to a refusal by the authorities to release its members from custody.
Some detainees being held at a police station in Kano were thought to have been freed during Friday’s attacks.
Boko Haram is a shadowy group believed to have a number of factions with differing aims, including some with political links and a hard-core extremists’ cell.
Jonathan has said some Boko Haram members have infiltrated government - from the security agencies to the legislature and the executive arm of government.
Senate president David Mark said he and the speaker of the House of Representatives Aminu Tambuwal, had ignored security risks to travel to Kano.
“We want to ensure that a few misguided Nigerians who have been led into this action don’t take this country hostage,” he said.
Former president Olusegun Obasanjo sought to downplay the crisis.
“Even though it is a big challenge... it is not one that... shakes Nigeria to its foundation,” Obasanjo said in Banjul on Sunday.
Jonathan imposed emergency rule in parts of Nigeria’s north on December 31 after a wave of violence blamed on Boko Haram.
But Kano, which had escaped the worst of the violence in recent months, was not among the areas covered.
Relief workers said the death toll from Friday’s attacks was at least 166 but a doctor at a major hospital said the toll could soar to 250.
Around 50 people gathered Monday outside the main hospital’s morgue waiting to collect remains of their loved ones for burial.
Lying on a bed in a ward at the hospital with a bullet wound in his leg, tannery worker Monday Joseph, 29, said he was driving home from work with four colleagues when one of the bombs went off.
They abandoned the car and started running.
“The four of them died. I am the only one who survived,” he told AFP.
Nigeria’s supreme Muslim leader, the Sultan of Sokoto Sa’ad Abubakar, said “Nigeria is passing through a trying moment of general insecurity of overwhelming magnitude.”
Most of the recent major attacks have occurred in the northeast of the country, with many taking place despite the state of emergency.
Boko Haram claimed a Christmas Day bombing at a church near the capital Abuja which killed at least 44 people and an August attack against UN headquarters in Abuja that killed 25.
Attacks targeting Christians have given rise to fears of a wider religious conflict in Nigeria, which is roughly divided between a mainly Muslim north and predominantly Christian south.