Commissioner of Police in the state, Mr Muhammad Katsina, told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), in Kano on Friday that the members of the Shi’ite Islamic sect had taken away the corpses and injured persons.
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It did not refer to a second bomber, whom the Shiites said they captured before he could detonate his explosives.
“Our procession came under a suicide attack”, Muhammad Turi, who was leading thousands of Islamic Movement of Nigeria followers, told AFP.
“We are not surprised that we’ve been attacked because this is the situation all over the country”. Even after the chaos induced by the blast, the procession continued forward along the bloodstained road, reports The Guardian.
A second suicide bomber was detained before he could detonate his explosives, and he was being questioned.
“SYMBOLIC TREK”: The IMN followers were on a “symbolic trek” to Zaria, where the group’s leader Sheikh Ibrahim Zakzaky is based, to mark the 40th day of Ashura.
Jihad monitoring service SITE Intelligence said Boko Haram – which rarely claims responsibility for attacks – had named the bomber in a message on Twitter.
The two attackers were among the young men abducted by the terror group in the Borno state town of Mubi in 2014. In the last week alone, two other bombings have occurred, one in Maiduguri and the other in northern Cameroon, according to the Guardian.
Its uprising has killed 20,000 people and driven 2.3 million from their homes, according to human rights organization Amnesty International.
Boko Haram extremists have claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing of a procession of hundreds of Shiite Muslims and threatened more attacks on opponents of its radical form of Islam.
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Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari has given his military commanders until next month to end the conflict, but there are fears suicide and bomb attacks may persist.
