20120221
AFP
A man claiming to be a spokesman for Nigeria's extremist sect Boko Haram said Tuesday that the group was behind an attack that claimed about 30 lives in a crowded market.

A group of gunmen stormed the Baga market in the northeastern city of Maiduguri on Monday, setting off home-made bombs and shooting at stallholders and vendors, according to surviving traders.

"We were behind the Baga market attack of yesterday," a man calling himself Abul Qaqa, the sect's purported spokesman, told reporters in a conference call.

Witnesses and a medic said some 30 people were killed in the lunchtime attack in the flashpoint city which is also the home base of the sect, blamed for a wave of increasingly deadly attacks in Nigeria.

The military denied any civilians died in the assault but said that it had killed eight of the attackers.

But Abul Qaqa said: "None of our members was killed there.

"From all indications, security agencies and hospitals are concealing vital information."

The market opened on Tuesday amid tight security, but many stayed away.

Abul Qaqa said the attack was aimed at specific traders who helped arrest a Boko Haram member and handed him over to the military last week.

"We want to assure traders that we have no business with them. We have succeeded in tracking down the traders that worked against us. People should go about their normal life without any fear," Qaqa said.

Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state, has seen some of the worst violence blamed on the extremist sect, which has focused its attacks on the mainly Muslim north of Africa's most populous country.

Reacting to local media reports suggesting government was in preliminary stages of dialogue with some Boko Haram members, Qaqa repeated the group's earlier demands.

"Unless all our members are released, we would not talk with anybody and we would not cease fire," he said.

Boko Haram's intensified violence has shaken Africa's top oil producer, which is divided between a mainly Muslim north and mainly Christian south.

But as its attacks escalate, the group's specific aims remain largely unclear.

It has previously said that it wants to create an Islamic state in Nigeria's deeply impoverished north.

Top Nigerian politicians have denied that the Boko Haram insurgency is being fuelled by religious tensions, linking the group to like-minded external Islamist groups such as Al-Qaeda.

Many analysts however doubt the strength of those links and say Boko Haram remains focused on a domestic agenda.

The group launched an uprising in 2009 that was put down by a brutal military assault.

It fell dormant for about a year before re-emerging in 2010 and is now believed to have a number of different factions, including a hard-core Islamist cell.