Deadly attack on Nigeria's Bayero university in Kano

At least 16 people have been killed in a gun and bomb attack at a university in Nigeria’s northern city of Kano, Nigerian Red Cross officials say.

Six others were in a serious condition following the attack at Bayero University campus where Christian worshippers were holding a service.

Police are searching for the gunmen.

No group has said it launched the attack, but the violent Islamist Boko Haram group is active in Kano. It has recently attacked churches.

Nigeria’s central government has struggled to contain the militant group, which operates mainly in the predominantly Muslim north, but has also struck as far south as the capital, Abuja.

Sunday’s attack took place in one of the lecture theatres used as a place of worship by Christians.

A witness told AFP news agency the attackers had first thrown in explosives and fired shots, “causing a stampede among worshippers”.

“They now pursued them, shooting them with guns. They also attacked another service at the sporting complex.”

Another witness spoke of “pandemonium”, and said he had seen two men shooting indiscriminately.

UKPA, April 28

Journalists in Nigeria, already the target of threats and bribes, face a new danger after a radical Islamist sect bombed the offices of a major newspaper and vowed to “hit the media hard” in Africa’s most populous nation.

The sect known as Boko Haram said it carried out the suicide car bombing on Thursday at the offices of the influential newspaper ThisDay in Nigeria’s capital Abuja and an attack on an office the publication shared with others in the city of Kaduna. The violence killed at least seven people.

The sect later issued a statement via an internet publication saying it would target media groups that published stories it found unfair, a major threat by a group known to have killed at least two journalists already in its sectarian battle with Nigeria’s weak central government.

The press in Nigeria at times resembles the age of newspaper barons and yellow journalism in the US Oligarch families and politicians own many of the major newspapers that circulate in the country, while military rulers previously handed out television broadcast licenses to trusted friends.

Bloomberg, By Maram Mazen, April 29

Nigeria plans to increase oil production capacity to 4 million barrels a day by 2020 and expand its crude reserves to 40 billion barrels, Petroleum Minister Diezani Alison-Madueke said.

Africa’s largest oil producer also aims ”œin the years ahead” to boost output of liquefied natural gas by an additional 20 million metric tons a year from the current level of 26 million tons, she said in a speech delivered at Howard University in Washington, Levi Ajuonuma, a ministry spokesman, said in a statement e-mailed today and dated yesterday.

Nigeria pumped an average of 2.1 million barrels a day of oil this month, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The country estimates its current crude reserves at 37 billion barrels and its gas reserves at 187 trillion cubic feet, Ajuonuma said. These figures correspond with data that BP Plc compiled for the end of 2010.

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Nigeria’s Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta refuses to disarm, saying the government hasn’t met the group’s demands for local control of the delta’s oil. MEND threatened on April 14 to mount strikes on all pipelines and energy facilities. Authorities also blame Islamist group Boko Haram for a surge of attacks since 2009 against government buildings and security forces in the mostly Muslim north and Abuja, the capital.