Also on Wednesday, a senior Cameroonian military source said Boko Haram had killed a soldier from Cameroon in a cross-border incursion from Nigeria.
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More than 40 people sustained various degrees of injuries by the blast which occurred on Tuesday afternoon at Sabon Gari community, the unnamed local security source told Xinhua.
“It was concealed in a knapsack used for spraying herbicides”. Victims from the explosion were taken to Biu General Hospital.
On Tuesday, President Idriss Deby of Chad said publicly that an ongoing multilateral military operation in western Africa had succeeded in “decapitating” Boko Haram, and that the group’s new leadership sought negotiations with the Nigerian government.
“I have not heard of any individual called Mahamat Daoud”, said Jonathan Hill, of the Defence Studies Department at London’s King’s College, who closely monitors Boko Haram.
At least eight people were killed and about 100 kidnapped by suspected Boko Haram fighters in another Far North village last week. Since then, more than 900 people have been killed in Nigeria alone (according to statistics compiled by the AFP news agency).
Numerous insurgents are hiding out in Lake Chad, a shallow, marshy water body dotted with hundreds of islets, and in Nigeria’s Sambisa Forest near the border with Cameroon.
Buhari has vowed to crush the insurgency, which has made more than 1.5 million homeless since 2009.
Nigeria is going to establish a domestic weapons factory in an effort to cut its dependence on imported arms, President Muhammadu Buhari has said.
He explained that the people are distressed as they have been forgotten by the federal government even as numerous displaced persons in Cameroon have been brought back to Nigeria.
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The challenge, Deby said, was to “avoid terrorist acts and that’s why we must organise at the regional level to prevent bomb-making materials and other explosives entering our countries”.
