4 suicide bombers kill 28 in Cameroon

Local officials say that four suicide bombers attacked a town in Cameroon’s far north region near the border with Nigeria, killing at least 28 people and wounding 65 others.

Governor Midjiyawa Bakari said Monday that two attackers detonated explosives at a market and two others blew themselves up in the town of Bodo.

Mr Bakari said that the wounded are in the hospital. He said the attackers came from Nigeria. A Cameroon troop commander, Gen. Jacob Kodji, confirmed the attack and said Nigeria’s Islamic extremist group Boko Haram are suspected.

He said soldiers have been deployed to the area. The Islamic militants, who have killed thousands in a six-year insurgency, began stepping up attacks early last year on neighbouring Cameroon and other countries contributing in efforts to crush Boko Haram.

Since 2013, nearly 1,200 people have died in Boko Haram attacks in Cameroon’s far north, according to a toll given this month by communications minister Issa Chiroma Bakary.

Up until then, when Cameroon bolstered its military presence along the border with Nigeria, Boko Haram fighters had slipped back and forth across the frontier, often using the remote north of Cameroon as a rear base and acquiring arms, vehicles and supplies there.

Cameroon since has ordered its Army to go on the offensive, joining troops from Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Benin in a regional coalition against Boko Haram.

Elsewhere in Nigeria, Boko Haram Islamists killed a civilian and torched his house during a raid on a village in the northeastern state of Yobe, a police spokesman said on Monday. Travelling in all-terrain vans, they raided Babban Gida village on Sunday.