Security fears grip northern Nigeria, as polls are set to open in presidential elections after a week-long delay.
11 minutes ago Unknown assailants on Saturday attacked a northeastern Nigerian town, forcing people to flee hours before presidential polls were due to open, residents said.
“We have fled, along with our wives and children and hundreds of others,” Ibrahim Gobi, who lives in the town of Geidam in Yobe state, said by telephone. “We are right now running and hiding in the bushes.”
Around the same time, a Reuters news agency witness said blasts were heard in Maiduguri, the capital of the neighbouring state of Borno.
Al Jazeera’s Ahmed Idris, reporting from a polling station in Maiduguri, said armed group Boko Haram had vowed to disrupt the elections.
“This is what foreign embassies in Nigeria warned their citizens about long before this election. This morning we woke up to the sound of explosions here in Maiduguri, some are talking about at least a dozen explosions.
“The fighting, or the explosions we have heard so far, has not deterred some of the voters who are eager to cast their ballots in the election,” Idris added.
“Since the break of dawn, people were on the road, trying to access polling stations, trying to exercise their rights as citizens of this country. But of course the delay has discouraged at least some people who had to travel long distances.”
Northeast Nigeria has been hit by the decade-long Boko Haram campaign with attacks in recent months carried out by the offshoot Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) in West Africa Province.
The unrest comes as Nigerians are set to vote for a new president on Saturday after a week-long delay that has raised political tempers, sparked conspiracy claims and stoked fears of violence.
Some 120,000 polling stations were due to open at 07:00 GMT, from megacity Lagos and the oil hub Port Harcourt in the south, to ancient Kano in the north and the country’s rural heartlands.
