Officials say the bombing of a newspaper office in Nigeria's capital has killed three people, while another blast near the same publication's office in the northern city of Kaduna has killed at least three others.
Officials say the first explosion Thursday went off at the Abuja office of This Day, one of Nigeria's most prominent national papers. A local resident said the explosion shook his house at around 11 a.m. local time.
The chairman of the paper's editorial board, Olusegun Adeniya, said a suicide bomber rammed a jeep into the gate of the building. He said the attack killed two security men and the bomber.
Meanwhile, a VOA reporter in Kaduna says police have a man in custody after a bomb exploded just before noon local time outside of a compound that houses This Day and two other papers - The Moment and The Sun. Officials say that blast left at least three dead and several injured.
Kaduna resident Diji Obadiah says the bomber rammed his vehicle into the newspaper compound while shouting "God is great" in Arabic.
"When people saw, they thought he just mistakenly hit the building," said Obadiah. "They pull[ed] him out and then he was telling them, 'There is a bomb, there is a bomb.'"
Obadiah said people wanted to "lynch" the bomber when he pulled a bomb out of his car, so he threw the explosive device at the crowd.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for either explosion.
For two years, authorities have struggled to stop a wave of bombings and shootings in the north, most of them blamed on the radical Islamic sect Boko Haram.
"He ran into the compound trying to crash the vehicle into the compound," said Obadiah. "But the vehicle did not explode and he was shouting 'Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar', means 'God is great, God is great.' Now when people saw they thought he just mistakenly hit the building inside so they tried to bring him out thinking that he sustained injury. He refused."
"Then they pull him out and then he was telling them there is a bomb, there is a bomb," he said. "So somebody said you must remove that bomb so he picked one of the parcels of the bomb then he rushed out with it. Then when the youth wanted to lynch him, he throw the bomb at them and it exploded and three people died instantly."
Some information for this report was provided by AP, AFP and Reuters.
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