Jos Explosion; retaliatory violence leaves 10 dead

After a suicide car bomber attacked a Catholic church on Sunday in the middle of Mass, a retaliatory violence followed as Christian youths killed at least 10 people in reprisal attacks after a suspected suicide bomber hit a Catholic church in the central Nigerian city of Jos on Sunday, killing three people, authorities said.

"The situation is bad," health commissioner for Jos Sati Dakwat told Reuters. "Several were killed in the reprisal attacks, more than 10."
A Reuters reporter at the scene of the church bombing was unable to gain access, as the police had cordoned off the area around Finber's Catholic Church in the Rayfield suburb of Jos.
"We haven't got actual figures of injured yet, but at least three people have been confirmed dead by our men attending the scene of the blast," the Jos coordinator for the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) Al Hassan Aliyu said.
Earlier NEMA called it a suspected suicide bombing, but Aliyu said this was not yet confirmed.
Islamist sect Boko Haram has claimed responsibility for a wave of bomb attacks on churches across Nigeria since Christmas Day. The bombing campaign has raised fears that the group is trying to ignite sectarian conflict in Africa's most populous country, split roughly evenly between Christians and Muslims.
In the past decade Jos has become the main flashpoint for tensions between Nigeria's Christian and Muslim communities. Bombers have targeted its churches many times since Christmas.
A Reuters witness watched angry Christians set up road blocks near the church. In the past, such a move has preceded retaliatory violence against Muslims.
Boko Haram, whose name means "Western education is forbidden", wants sharia law more widely applied across Nigeria.
The sect has been waging an insurgency against Nigeria's government since 2009, and has been blamed for hundreds of killings in gun and bomb attacks.

SECT STIRS TURBULENCE Styled on the Taliban, Boko Haram's methods have become more
sophisticated in the past six months, and it has widened its targets beyond the police and other authority figures to include Christian worshippers.
On February 26 a suicide bomber drove a car packed with explosives into a church in Jos, killing two people and wounding 38. Christian youths beat two Muslims to death in revenge.
Other cities have also been affected.
A bomb at a Catholic Church in Madala, just outside the capital Abuja, killed 37 people and wounded 57 on Christmas Day. Another blast struck a church in Jos.
Boko Haram claimed responsibility for previous attacks, citing violence against Muslims by Christians in Jos as justification.
Despite its Islamist ideology, it is Muslims in the north of Nigeria who mostly bear the brunt of the sect's violence.
Suspected sect members shot dead a traditional ruler in the northeastern Gombe state, as he left a mosque after Friday prayers two days ago.
The bomb detonated as worshippers attended the final Mass of the day at St. Finbar's Catholic Church in Jos, a city where thousands have died in the last decade in religious and ethnic violence. Security at the gate of the church's compound stopped the suspicious car and the bomber detonated his explosives during an altercation that followed, Plateau state spokesman Pam Ayuba said.
The blast damaged the church's roof, blew out its windows and destroyed a portion of the fence surrounding the church's compound, Ayuba said.
"He destroyed so many things," the spokesman said.
The bombing sparked retaliatory violence in Jos later Sunday, with angry youths burning down homes and soldiers guarding the city opening fire in neighbourhoods, witnesses said. Ayuba said at least 10 people died in the bombing, though others said the number of dead included those killed in retaliatory attacks. Soldiers also were wounded in the blast.
No group immediately claimed responsibility though the city has been targeted in the past by a radical Islamist sect known as Boko Haram. The sect claimed a series of bombings in Jos on Christmas Eve in 2010 that killed as many as 80 people. The sect also claimed a similar church bombing on Feb. 26 on the main headquarters of the Church of Christ that killed three people and wounded 38 others.
The sect, which speaks to journalists through telephone conference calls at times of its choosing, could not be immediately reached for comment Sunday.
Jos and surrounding Plateau state have been torn apart in recent years by violence pitting its different ethnic groups and major religions — Christianity and Islam — against each other. Human Rights Watch says at least 1,000 people were killed in communal clashes around Jos in 2010.
The violence, though fractured across religious lines, often has more to do with local politics, economics and rights to grazing lands. Muslims in the city also say they are locked out of lucrative jobs in the region as the Christian-led state government doesn't recognize them as citizens.
The Catholic church attack also comes after a failed raid Thursday by British and Nigerian commandos left a Briton and an Italian hostage dead in Nigeria's far northwest. British officials have blamed a splinter cell of Boko Haram for the attack, something a spokesman for the group has denied.
However, the attack has opened a new front on Nigeria's ongoing struggle with terrorism, showing any region across the nation's Muslim north can be attacked — and anyone, including foreigners, could be targeted.
Meanwhile Sunday, police said two separate attacks in northeast Nigeria blamed on the sect killed two people. One attack happened at a paramilitary police base in the town of Bama in Borno state, while the other happened during the day in Maiduguri, the sect's spiritual home, authorities said.