Boko Haram is believed to be responsible for Saturday’s bombing in a crowded northern Nigeria market.
The bomb killed at least 20 people and injured many more.
The Boko Haram suicide bomber who detonated the bomb was a girl, only about 10 years old. It is said that the bomb tore her little body apart.
She was hiding the bomb under her veil, but reports suggest she may not have even been aware that she was wearing it.
The little girl was being screened by vigilante security before entering the market. Witnesses say she resisted and that’s when security noticed a bulge around her waist. Then the bomb went off.
“It’s a little girl,” said a hospital official who spoke to the New York Times on the condition of anonymity. “The body is beyond recognition, but from the face you can see it’s a young person. A young pretty girl.”
This little girl is one of the youngest, possibly the youngest, recruit of Boko Haram to have ever detonated a suicide bomb.
The horror is blinding, but the shocking news is that this kind of thing is happening more and more with Boko Haram.
“It’s something quite new, and it’s disturbing, using these young, young girls wearing hijabs,” a top police official in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, said after the bombing.“Now, one has to be suspicious of any lady wearing a hijab — whether it’s a young lady, or an old lady.”
Boko Haram is the militant Islamic terrorist group responsible for the kidnapping of nearly 300 girls from the town of Chibok last April. All but 57 of those girls are still missing.
Boko Haram has increased the number of kidnappings of girls recently, increasing the number of “recruits” they could possibly add to their list of bombers.
