Nigeria Gunmen Kill Seven in Attacks on Security Forces

Gunmen killed seven people in northern Nigeria in separate attacks yesterday that targeted the West African nation’s security forces, police and military officials said.

Gunmen on motorbikes opened fire on a military patrol in the northeastern town of Mubi in Adamawa state, killing a soldier, a policeman and three civilians who were hit by stray bullets, Altine Daniel, a police spokesman, said by telephone today from the city of Yola, the state capital.

“Three soldiers also sustained serious injuries,” Daniel said.

In the northern city of Kano, attackers on motorbikes shot dead two policemen and injured another at a checkpoint, Ikedi Iweaha, a military spokesman in the city, said by telephone today.

Authorities in Nigeria, Africa’s top oil producer, blame the Taliban-inspired Islamist group of Boko Haram, whose name means “Western education is a sin,” for a surge in gun and bomb attacks in the country’s mainly Muslim north that have claimed hundreds of lives since 2009.

Boko Haram this month denied its members killed a British and Italian hostage in the northwest state of Sokoto during an attempted rescue by Nigerian and U.K. special forces troopers. Nigeria accused the group of responsibility.

To contact the reporter on this story: Gbenga Akingbule in Maiduguri at gakingbule@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Andrew J. Barden at barden@bloomberg.net