Bomb blasts blamed on Boko Haram killed 29 people in Nigeria and 24 in Cameroon, officials said on Thursday, after Nigeria’s new president warned that the US refusal to sell his country strategic weapons is “aiding and abetting” the extremist group.
Nigeria’s National Emergency Management Agency called Thursday for urgent blood donations to treat 105 wounded people, according to spokesman Sani Datti, AP reported.
He said at least 29 bodies have been recovered at two bustling bus stations in northeastern Gombe town, the latest targets in a campaign that has spilled across Nigeria’s borders.
In neighboring Cameroon, two suicide bombers on Wednesday killed at least 22 people at a marketplace near the border. The toll was likely to rise among the 50 injured, officials said.
Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari returned home Thursday to the capital, Abuja, from a four-day visit to the US where he was warmly received by President Barack Obama but failed to get all he wanted.
Buhari told policymakers at the US Institute for Peace that Nigeria’s armed forces are “largely impotent” because they do not possess the appropriate weapons to fight the Boko Haram militants.
He urged the US President Barack Obama and Congress to be more flexible about the Leahy Law that prohibits weapon sales to countries whose military are accused of gross human rights violations.
Amnesty International charges Nigeria’s military is responsible for the deaths of 8,000 detainees, twice as many as Boko Haram’s victims in the first four years of its six-year-old insurgency.
