Suspected
members of Islamist sect Boko Haram killed five people and lost four of their
members in a
series of
gun battles in Nigeria's second largest city Kano on Sunday.
Residents
said gunfire and explosions could be heard late on Sunday in the city,
Nigeria's mostly-Muslim
north.
Kano Police
Commissioner Ibrahim Idris said that suspected members of the sect attempted to
attack a
mosque near the Bayero University on Sunday evening before police engaged them
in a gun
battle,
where four of the sect members were killed.
Earlier,
gunmen on motorbikes killed five people in two separate attacks in other areas
of Kano, one
targeting
airforce staff, military spokesman Lt Ikediche Iweha said.
Boko Haram
has killed hundreds this year in an insurgency against President Goodluck
Jonathan's
administration.
The sect
wants to carve out an Islamic state within Africa's largest oil exporter, a
country of more than
160 million
people split roughly equally between Muslims and Christians.
In January,
Boko Haram killed 186 people in a wave of coordinated bomb and gun attacks in
Kano, its
deadliest
strikes to date. There have been several attacks in the city since.
The majority
of Boko Haram's attacks take place in Borno state, hundreds of miles east of
Kano in the far
northeast
corner of Africa's most populous nation, where the sect had its first major
uprising in 2009.