A bungled bomb killed three people, including a suicide bomber, in Nigeria’s Jos city on Saturday night, a police official said, four days after >twin car bombs blamed on Islamic extremists killed at least 130 people in the central city.
The senior police official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the bomber dropped a bag holding explosives at an outdoor theatre crowded with people watching a European soccer cup final. He said the bomber and two others died.
The venue is not far from the bustling marketplace that was targeted in Tuesday’s attack.
There were no immediate claims of responsibility for the latest attack.
But the Islamic extremist group Boko Haram, which has been threatening to sell nearly 300 abducted schoolgirls into slavery, has been waging a two-pronged campaign of urban bombings and rural attacks on northeastern villages.
Separate car bombs in April killed about 100 people in Abuja, Nigeria’s central capital, and a car bomb that exploded prematurely on Monday >killed at least 24 people in northern Kano , the country’s second most populous city.
The attacks appear to be in defiance of an >international campaign to rescue the girls and a commitment made at a summit of Nigeria, its neighbours and Western leaders in Paris a week ago to unite to wage total war on Boko Haram.
Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan and his government are confronting national and international outrage at their failure to rescue the abducted girls.
Thousands have been killed in the 5-year-old Islamic uprising that aims to turn Nigeria into an Islamic state, though the country’s population is almost equally divided between a mainly Muslim north and predominantly Christian south.
The majority Christian city has been tense since Tuesday’s attack.
Police have refused to comment on residents’ reports that a man wearing a suicide bomber vest was arrested April 17 and warned that several Boko Haram insurgents had orders to plant bombs at churches and public places in Jos.
