Christmas Eve bloodshed as bomb explodes at mosque killing five

Shoes litter the ground outside the mosque which was attacked (Image: AP )

A Christmas Eve bomb has left at least five dead and injured 35 in a suspected suicide attack on a mosque. Police said the horror attack happened in Nigeria’s northeastern city of Maiduguri on Wednesday night. Nahum Daso, spokesperson for the police command in the surrounding state of Borno, said in a statement that fragments of a suspected suicide vest were found at the site.

The bombing is the latest in a series of attacks in Nigeria's troubled northern region, where the country is battling multiple armed groups, including Boko Haram and its splinter group, Islamic State West Africa Province.

Several thousand people have been killed in the region in violence between Christian and Muslim groups, with millions displaced from their homes since 2009, according to the United Nations.

Locals and police gather outside the bombed mosque in Maiduguri (Image: AP )

No group has claimed responsibility for the attack, but the use of suicide bombers has been heavily attributed to Boko Haram, the Islamic militant group that has previously claimed responsibility for many such attacks across the northeastern region.

Analysts say the group's use of suicide bombers has subsided over the past few years, but it still has the capacity to launch such attacks.

In July 2024, a three-pronged suicide attack on a wedding ceremony in Borno raised the spectre of a renewed use of the method by the militant group.

Boko Haram seek to create an Islamic caliphate in the Borno region. In 2014, the terror group kidnapped 276 girls from their school in the town of Chibok. The atrocity sparked a global campaign #BringBackOurGirls, with supporters including former US First Lady, Michelle Obama. 

There has been ongoing unrest in the Maiduguri region of Nigeria (Image: AP )

A decade later, more than 180 have since escaped or been freed. 

Earlier this month some 130 schoolchildren and staff abducted in another mass kidnapping from a Nigerian Catholic school in November by gunmen were released, police said.

Gunmen seized at least 303 schoolchildren and 12 teachers in Nigeria’s north-central Niger state when they attacked St. Mary’s Catholic School in the Papiri community on November 21. Fifty escaped in the hours that followed, and 100 schoolchildren were freed earlier this month.

On December 21, Niger State police spokesperson Wasiu Abiodun said “the remaining batch of the abducted students" has now been released.

“A total number of 130 victims, including the staff, have been released,” Abiodun said.

Presidential spokesperson Bayo Onanuga said in a post on X that the “remaining 130 schoolchildren abducted” have been released.

He said the released schoolchildren would arrive in Minna, the Niger state capital and rejoin their parents for Christmas.