3 Killed as Suspected Nigeria Islamists Bomb Police, Banks

Suspected Islamists on Sunday bombed two police buildings, two banks and killed three people, including a policeman and a soldier in the volatile northern Nigeria's Bauchi State, residents said.

The attacks by suspected members of the radical Boko Haram sect, which also seriously injured two other policemen, happened in the town of Azare and lasted four hours, they said.

The attackers armed with heavy machine guns, threw explosives and fired heavy machine guns into a regional police headquarters and an adjoining police station in the town, setting fire to the buildings, residents said.

"They came in a large convoy of cars armed with heavy machine guns and headed to the police area command office and bombed it along with the divisional police station attached to it," resident Usman Musa told Agence France Presse.

"The attackers left behind a black banner hanging at the entrance of the police station with the Arabic inscription of 'Allahu Akbar'(God is Great), which made people suspect they were Boko Haram," he said.

The attackers also bombed and robbed two banks in the town, 230 kilometers (140 miles) from the state capital Bauchi, residents said.

Musa, who was at the federal medical centre where victims from the attacks were taken said he saw the bodies of a soldier, a policeman and an errand boy for the police, while two policemen were being treated for gunshot wounds.

Another resident Garba Mohammed said two banks were bombed by the attackers who broke into the vaults.

"They emptied the banks' safes and made away with the money," said Mohammed, a dealer in second-hand clothes.

Mohammed said unexploded bomb canisters littered the banks' premises and policemen kept curious residents away while an anti-bomb squad worked to defuse the explosives.

Boko Haram has been blamed for scores of bomb and gun attacks in Nigeria in recent months, including Bauchi where four people were injured last month when a roadside bomb exploded in the city.

The sect staged a prison raid in September last year in Bauchi, freeing more than 700 inmates, and claimed to be behind bomb attacks on an open air beer garden at a military barracks on May 29 when President Goodluck Jonathan was sworn in.

The sect has also claimed responsibility for the August suicide bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Abuja which killed at least 24 people and coordinated attacks in the country's northeast on November 4 that left some 150 people dead.