(Bloomberg) — Nigerian security forces disarmed two bombs at a girls’ school in a refugee camp in the northeastern city of Maiduguri and arrested two suspected members of the Islamist Boko Haram group in connection with the foiled attack.
“The explosives were sighted at the camp and police were quickly alerted; they came and defused them,” Isa Mohammed, a member of a militia group that helps security forces, said by phone from Maiduguri on Saturday.
The explosives were planted at a government-run girls’ secondary school in the capital of Borno state, the center of Boko Haram’s six-year campaign to create a caliphate in northern Nigeria.
The conflict with Boko Haram, which claimed at least 1,600 lives in January and more than 4,700 in 2014, led officials to delay national elections scheduled for Feb. 14 by six weeks. The presidential vote on March 28 is set to be the most closely contested since the end of military rule in 1999.
