Bomb blast rocks national Police Headquarters in Abuja

The main building of the Nigerian Police headquarters. This is a file picture taken before the bomb blast

On 16 June, a bomb exploded at the national headquarters of the Nigeria Police Force in Abuja, shaking several buildings in the area. There are yet no figures of casualties, but emergency agency sources say several dead bodies have been found, and many more are wounded.

The Police headquarters, stands just outside the Three Arms Zone, in which the Presidential Villa (Aso Villa), the National Assembly (parliament) and the Supreme Court, are located.

Several sources within Abuja’s central district report that the explosion occurred within the sprawling premises of the headquarters, setting dozens of cars in the vast parking lot ablaze. The multi-storey “Louis Edet” building, in which the police top brass have their offices, was apparently not directly impacted.

The sources report that a dense plume of smoke was rising from the compound and that the Police Anti-Bomb squad, along with members of the Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC), had speedily cordoned off the area, with ambulances racing in to evacuate casualties. They report a chaotic traffic situation on the Shehu Shagari Way, the main drag on which the police headquarters is located, and on many other streets leading into the central busineess district.

The Public Relations Officer of the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), Mr Yushau Shuaib, said a suspected suicide bomber died in the explosion. But there has been no official statement from police authorities on whether he was actually a suicide bomber, or whether the bomb may have gone off on him accidentally, while he was still planting it within the compound.

It is also not certain who may be responsible for the blast, but the militant Islamist group, Boko Haram, has been targeting security personnel and especially police stations in the north eastern Borno State since mid-2010. The group claimed responsibility for a series of bombings in Bauchi, Zaria and Zuba (near Abuja) hours after President Goodluck Jonathan was inaugurated president on 29 May.

Only a day ago (15 June), it called off proposed peace talks with the government and promised to widen the scope of its attacks to “all the northern states and the Federal Capital Territory (Abuja)”, using “Jihadists (warriors)” who recently “arrived Nigeria from Somalia where they got serious training on warfare from our brethren who made the country of Somalia ungovernable”.

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