Car bomb explodes at Nigeria polling station

A car bomb has exploded at a polling station in Nigeria’s south-central Enugu state as people gathered to vote in a presidential election.

Car bomb explodes at Nigeria polling station

A car bomb has exploded at a polling station in Nigeria’s south-central Enugu state as people gathered to vote in a presidential election.

State Police Commissioner Dan Bature said an anti-bomb squad detonated two other cars filled with improvised explosive devises at the scene at a primary school.

There was no claim of responsibility. The explosions occurred far from north-eastern Nigeria, the centre of Boko Haram’s Islamic uprising.

Nearly 60 million voters are registered for the first election in Nigeria’s history where an opposition candidate has a realistic chance of defeating a sitting president.

President Goodluck Jonathan and former military dictator Muhammadu Buhari are front-runners among 14 candidates seeking to govern Africa’s most populous nation.

Dozens have been killed in pre-election violence, though leading candidates signed a peace pledge. Some 1,000 people were killed in rioting after Buhari lost to Jonathan in 2011.

Buhari was the first voter to have his fingerprints taken at a polling station that opened a half hour late in Daura, his home town in northern Katsina state.

The registration of Jonathan, in black with his trademark Fedora hat, was delayed in the southern oil-rich state of Bayelsa. Three newly imported card readers failed to recognise his fingerprints, and his wife’s. He returned two hours later and was accredited without the machine. Biometric cards and readers are being used for the first time to discourage the kind of fraud that has marred previous votes.

Afterward, Jonathan wiped sweat from his brow and urged people to be patient as he had, telling Channels TV: “I appeal to all Nigerians to be patient no matter the pains it takes as long as if, as a nation, we can conduct free and fair elections that the whole world will accept.”

Nigeria’s military yesterday announced it had destroyed the headquarters of Boko Haram’s so-called Islamic caliphate and driven the insurgents from all major areas in north east Nigeria.

The failure of Jonathan’s administration to curb the insurgency, which killed about 10,000 people last year, has angered many Nigerians especially in the north.

International outrage has grown over another failure – the rescue of 219 schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram nearly a year ago. The extremists have abducted hundreds more since then, using them as sex slaves and fighters.

Jonathan and Buhari on Thursday signed a peace pledge and promised to accept the results of a free and fair election. But already dozens have been killed amid hate speech highlighting the religious, ethnic and geographic divisions among Nigerians.

The Islamic uprising has exacerbated relations between Christians like Jonathan, who dominate the oil-rich south, and Muslims like Buhari who are the majority in the agricultural and cattle-herding lands of the north. The population of 170 million is almost evenly divided between Christians and Muslims.

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