Two Killed in Explosion Outside Church in Jos. Nigeria

Two people were killed in a bomb blast outside the ECWA Church, Nasarawa Gwom in Jos, a city in Nigeria’s Plateau state, a region beset in recent months by sectarian violence, a government official said.

“We suspect the two men were trying to plant a bomb outside the church while Sunday service was on when the bomb exploded, killing both of them,” Gregory Yenlong, the Plateau State commissioner for information in a telephone interview. “A major tragedy was aborted today, because there was a very large congregation.”

More than 200 people have died in reprisal attacks by Christian and Muslim groups in the Plateau region, according to New York-based Human Rights Watch, since multiple bomb blasts in Jos city on Christmas Eve killed 80 people. A radical Islamic sect known as Boko Haram, or “Western education is a sin,” claimed responsibility for the explosions.

Nigeria, Africa’s top oil producer and most populous nation with about 140 million people, is roughly split between a mainly Muslim north and a predominantly Christian south. More than 14,000 people died in ethnic and religious clashes in the West African nation between 1999 and 2009, according to the Brussels- based International Crisis Group.

To contact the reporter on this story: Sam Olukoya in Lagos at solukoya2@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Antony Sguazzin at asguazzin@bloomberg.net