Sunday, June 19, 2011

History of bomb blasts in Nigeria

Vanguard
17 June 2011


LAGOS -  The history of recent bomb blasts in Nigeria could be traced to 1986, during the Gen. Ibrahim Babangida-led military regime, when Mr. Dele Giwa, the founding Editor-in-Chief of Newswatch magazine, was killed by a mail bomb in his home in Ikeja, Lagos, widely believed to have been state-sponsored.

Since then, series of other bombing incidents have been reported in the country, with majority of them happening under the despotic rule of the late General Sanni Abacha, who was rumoured to be behind most of the bombings and some state-sponsored killings to intimidate opponents of his regime.

There was an isolated case of accidental bombs explosion that took place at Ikeja cantonment in 2002, leading to the death of more than one thousand persons.

It was not until March 2010 that Nigeria began to witness bomb blast as an act of terrorism in the civilian era when some bombs went off in Warri during an Amnesty Dialogue organised by Vanguard Newspapers in support of the amnesty programme of the then President Umaru Yar’Ádua to tackle the cases of militancy in the Niger Delta region.

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