An Inglorious Death

The news arrived at around 10 p.m., as we were sitting at an outdoor chicken joint in the moral no-mans-land between Kadunas Christian and Muslim quarters. An English soccer highlights show blared on the TV in the corner, and a massive Nigerian special forces officer–trained in Israel and tested in Bosnia–was giving us the details of his plot to derail the marriage of an erstwhile mistress when his phone rang.

"He says theres been a bomb attack," he told us after hanging up. A few calls to security contacts, and he dismissed it as a rumor, pouring all three of us a glass of his sickeningly sweet Spanish wine before returning to the subject at hand.

"She told me in a text message," he continued, showing us the wedding invitation on his phone.

Nigeria has been rife with rumors since legislative elections, scheduled for the previous Saturday, were called off after voting materials, including senate ballots and result sheets, could not be delivered to polling stations on time. The delay had spawned a slew of conspiracy theories, most with little merit. This bombing, however, would prove to be very real.

On the way to visit a Christian neighborhood the next morning, a local journalist rang. One person had been killed and another injured in the blast the previous evening on the southern edge of the city. The survivor was at a nearby hospital.

Twenty-five-year-old Mohammed Ahmed was lying on a rickety iron bed in a communal ward when we arrived. Naked except for a pair of dingy plaid shorts, blood soaked gauze clung to the wounds on his inner thighs and knees. His nose and the right side of his mouth were packed with surgical cotton. An IV entered his arm just above the wrist.

He was flanked by two bored police officers toting AK-47s who allowed a group of local reporters to lean forward for an interview. Mohammed said he didnt speak English, so as they finished, I asked one of the journalists if he could translate for me.

"A friend of mine called and said hed come down from Kano State," he began in a whisper. "He asked me to meet him. We met and were talking when someone called him on the phone then came by in a car. One was an Arab, and the other was black. They brought a package."

"When they left, I asked my friend what it was, and he said it was a bomb. I asked who the others were, and he said one had been sent from Afghanistan. We were still talking when the bomb went off," he recounted.

A detective standing nearby told me the police were planning to move Mohammed to police headquarters.

"Hes hiding certain facts. But we think he was part of the team. And we think they were planning to disrupt the elections tomorrow," he said.

"We went into the house. We saw everything: the wires, batteries, pliers, chemicals. They were making them there. This was a network...a terrorist organization. Weve already arrested a dozen people," the detective said.

A local imam I spoke to later would categorically rule out the Afghan connection.

"Theres no Taliban here. They say that because they are afraid if they tell the truth their families will be arrested or their brothers will be killed," he said.

The morgue across town was a dilapidated, cinder-block structure separated from the main building of the Barau Dikko Hospital by an empty parking lot. A generator housed next door belched black smoke, and the place was saturated with the overpowering stench of diesel and death.

The body emerged from the ancient cooler on a metal shelf, head first. He was young, in his teens or early 20s, and looked peaceful. His eyes were closed. His head turned slightly to the side. His torso, clad in a green basketball jersey bearing the words "Buena Park" and the number 98, had not been touched by the blast. But the bomb had ripped through his legs, shredding the flesh at the knees. I mentioned his ashen features, and the facilitys quiet, middle-aged manager confirmed: he had died of blood loss.

"We dont know his name," he said.

Later that evening, as poll workers arrived to receive their assignments for the next days elections, a bomb tore through the office of the national elections commission in Suleja, a suburb of the capital, Abuja, killing 12 and wounding a dozen more. Four were shot dead by gunmen in Borno State as they distributed election materials. And a bomb attack on a polling station on election day killed at least one, and, according to some local press reports, as many as 12 in the town of Maiduguri.