20110820
Reuters
MAIDUGURI, Nigeria (Reuters) - Members of a radical Nigerian Islamist sect shot dead three policemen and a civilian after breaking into the house of one of the officers in the northeastern town of Maiduguri on Friday, police said.

Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state, has been the scene of months of attacks by Boko Haram, whose name roughly translated from the local Hausa language is "Western education is sinful".

Most attacks target the police and other authority figures but this is the first strike reported at a policeman's home.

"The Boko Haram members burst into the residence of one of the policemen when three of them and the civilian were watching television and opened fire, killing all of them instantly," Simeon Midenda, Borno state police commissioner, told reporters.

"The sect members have been watching our success at foiling all their efforts so they have changed tactics and have resorted to attacking our personnel at their residences."

Police said on Friday they had arrested a shop owner who sold chemicals to people suspected of involvement in Monday's failed car bomb attack on the police headquarters in Maiduguri.

A man was shot dead by police after he rammed the car filled with explosives, which failed to detonate, through the gates leading to the police station, similar to a strike in the capital Abuja in June, carried out by Boko Haram.

The police commissioner of Yobe, another state in the remote northeast on the Niger border, said one of his patrols arrested eight members of Boko Haram behind a bomb attack last week and transferred them to police headquarters in Abuja.

Bomb blasts in the north have replaced militant attacks on oil facilities hundreds of miles away in the southern Niger Delta as the main security threat in Nigeria.

Boko Haram's views, which include wanting sharia law more widely applied across Nigeria, are not backed by most of the country's Muslim population, the largest in sub-Saharan Africa.

President Goodluck Jonathan has appointed a committee to look into the unrest in the northeast. The team was supposed to deliver its report on Tuesday but was given a two-week extension after presenting preliminary findings.