Authorities in northeastern Nigeria say at least 14 people are dead after a suicide bombing blamed on the Boko Haram extremist group, AP reports.
Bello Dambatta, head of the rapid response team for the State Emergency Agency, SEMA, said a female suicide bomber sneaked into a building late Friday in Dikwa, east of the city of Maiduguri, and detonated her explosives.
Volunteers said at least two dozen others were wounded and had to wait until Saturday morning to be evacuated because of safety concerns and the lack of phone service.
Meanwhile, three geologists abducted in an ambush attack Tuesday by Boko Haram insurgents have appeared in new video calling on the Nigerian government to negotiate the workers’ release.
Authorities say at least 48 people were killed in that attack near Lake Chad.
READ: Man kills wife for ‘laughing’ at him
Boko Haram is an Islamic extremist terrorist group based in northeastern Nigeria, also active in Chad, Niger and northern Cameroon.
The group was led by Abubakar Shekau until August 2016, when he was succeeded by Abu Musab al-Barnawi.
The group had alleged links to al-Qaeda, but in March 2015, it announced its allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
Since the current insurgency started in 2009, it has killed 20,000 and displaced 2.3 million from their homes and was ranked as the world’s deadliest terror group by the Global Terrorism Index in 2015.
Of the 2.3 million people displaced by the conflict since May 2013, at least 250,000 have left Nigeria and fled into Cameroon, Chad or Niger.
Boko Haram killed over 6,600 in 2014.
The group have carried out mass abductions including the kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls from Chibok in April 2014.
Corruption in the security services and human rights abuses committed by them have hampered efforts to counter the unrest.
In mid-2014, the militants gained control of swathes of territory in and around their home state of Borno, estimated at 50,000 square kilometres (20,000 sq mi) in January 2015, but did not capture the state capital, Maiduguri, where the group was originally based.
In September 2015, the Director of Information at the Defence Headquarters of Nigeria announced that all Boko Haram camps had been destroyed.
