Blast wrecks Nigerian police headquarters

A bomb ripped through a regional police headquarters today in the largest city in Nigeria’s Muslim north, tearing away its roof and blowing out windows in a blast felt miles away.

Meanwhile, other explosions could be heard across the city of Kano, Nigeria’s second-largest city.

Police could not be immediately reached for comment, but the bomb blast bore similarities to other attacks carried out by a radical Islamist sect responsible for hundreds of deaths in recent months.

A spokesman for the Nigeria Immigration Service in the capital Abuja said officials in Kano told him the blast shook their nearby office and came from a bomb.

An AP reporter could see a plume of smoke also rising from another neighbourhood in the city as people began fleeing the area.

Another reporter said the explosion was powerful enough to shake his car several miles away.

The explosion occurred as Nigeria faces increasing attacks from a radical Islamist sect known as Boko Haram. The sect has carried out increasingly sophisticated and bloody attacks in its campaign to implement strict Shariah law across Nigeria, a multi-ethnic nation of more than 160 million people.

Boko Haram, whose name means “Western education is sacrilege” in the local Hausa language, is responsible for at least 510 killings last year alone.