Boko Haram now burns schools in Nigeria

Boko Haram gunmen have burnt down a school in Nigeria’s troubled city of Maiduguri, the second such attack in two days , an official said Thursday.

The gunmen stormed Budun primary school in central Maiduguri Wednesday evening and set fire to classrooms and a store after seizing the security guard at gunpoint, according to state education commissioner, Tijjani Abba Ari.

“The gunmen held the security guard at gunpoint and set fire to a block of four classes and an adjoining store which gutted the whole block,” he said.

Another school was also burnt down by gunmen late Tuesday, Ari said.”We are dealing with an emerging trend that is quite disturbing because this is the second time in two days that a school was burnt by armed arsonists,” Ari said.

No one was hurt in the incident but the arson created panic in the city with pupils staying away from schools on Thursday, he said.

Ari did not name suspects in the arson but the radical Islamist Boko Haram group, which opposes western-type education, had threatened to attack public schools in retaliaion for alleged desecration of the Koran and a raid on an Islamic seminary in the city by security agents.
bloc ECOWAS by Nigeria’s navy chief Vice Admiral Sa’ad Ibrahim.

Sect leader Abubakar Shekau issued the threat last month in an audio message in which his group claimed the January 20 attack in the northern city of Kano that killed 185 people.
Meanwhile, a Nigerian military chief said today that the Boko Haram sect, blamed for attacks that have claimed hundreds of lives, has ties to Al-Qaeda, the first time a top security official has publicly drawn such links.

“We have been able to link the activities of the Boko Haram sect to the support and training the sect received from AQIM (Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb),” Air Chief Marshal Oluseyi Petinrin said.He did not elaborate.It was the first such public comment by a top security official in Nigeria linking the group to Al-Qaeda.Petinrin’s remarks were contained in speech read out at a meeting of security chiefs from the West African
Nations.