Nigeria troops attack Boko Haram hideout

Nigerian forces Wednesday raided the hideout of Islamist militants in Kano, killing the suspected mastermind of an attack on Christian worshippers, in a gun battle that lasted several hours in the main northern city. The raid followed a spate of attacks in the past days, believed to be by Islamist sect Boko Haram, which killed 30 people and dampened hopes that tighter security in the north had drastically reduced the sect’s capability. Residents of the Bubugaje slum area of Kano awoke to several loud explosions and the sound of gunfire. “It is really terrifying ... everyone is indoors,” said Anthonia Okafor, a student at Kano university. Hundreds have died in violence across the north and in the capital Abuja since the Islamists launched their uprising in 2009, targeting authorities, security forces and more recently the north’s Christian minority. “Our men just raided one of the hideouts of the elements ... where we discovered explosives and weapons,” said Lieutenant Iweha Ikedichi, a spokesman for the Joint Task Force (JTF) in Kano, Nigeria’s second biggest city. “The main suspect has been killed,” he added, referring to the suspected mastermind of an attack on a university in Kano on Sunday, when gunmen sprayed bullets in a lecture theatre being used for Christian worship. That attack and another one on Sunday against a church in northeast Maiduguri, Boko Haram’s spiritual headquarters, killed 19 people between them. Nigerian forces took journalists to the scene of the battle, a hot, dusty slum at the edge of a rusting industrial estate. They brought out three women and two children they said had been rescued from the house, which was partly demolished by fighting. The front wall was blasted off; the iron roof, collapsed. “The most difficult task we face with these terrorists is they know us but we don’t know them. They’re not rooted in a particular place,” Kano army commander Brigadier General Ilyasu Abba said, facing the house pocked with bullet and bomb craters. “We have rooted them out of here today, but tomorrow they could be somewhere else,” he said, adding that one suspect was arrested but two had escaped through the back door. Police Commissioner for Kano State Ibrahim Idris told Radio Nigeria that AK-47 assault rifles, 467 munitions and 45 cans full of explosives were seized in the raid in Kano, an ancient Islamic city once at the heart of the merchant caravan routes stretching across the Sahara from Africa’s interior to the Mediterranean. “Based on intelligence reports on the suspects’ hideout, a joint team comprising soldiers, police and the State Security Service commenced that operation this morning,” he said.