“Suspected extremists.” Well, it’s safe to assume at this point they’re not moderate. We had not heard much in the way of the jihad against vaccines in a while, though they have often been decried as a conspiracy to poison Muslims in various ways. Conspiracy theories do have a certain resiliency to them, because they do not need to have proof or even to make sense. “Bombs hit vaccine centre, government in northern Nigeria,” by Aminu Abubakar for Agence France-Presse, June 3:
Suspected extremists hurled bombs at a child vaccine warehouse and government offices in the restive city of Maiduguri in northeastern Nigeria, police said Thursday.
No casualties were recorded in the attacks that took place overnight and during the day on Thursday, police said.
Borno state police chief Mohammed Jinjiri Abubakar said the attackers, who he described as “religious fundamentalists”, used home-made bombs to strike.
One bomb went off Thursday “near the state (government) secretariat. Only the fence got broken. The explosive could not penetrate the premises,” he said.
In a separate attack on Wednesday night, attackers targeted a government-run warehouse where tens of thousands of doses of polio, measles and meningitis vaccines were stored.
Three cars in the parking lot were burnt in the attack.
The facility is located in Unguwar Doki neighbourhood where the late leader of the Boko Haram sect Mohammed Yusuf, frequently preached.
An Islamist sect known as Boko Haram, which launched an uprising in 2009 and has been blamed for dozens of killings in the northeast where it targets security forces, community leaders and government institutions.