3 N. Korean doctors slain in Nigeria

Health-board chief promises security for other workers in exchange program

— Assailants in northeastern Nigeria killed three North Korean doctors, beheading one of the physicians, in the latest attack on health workers in a nation under assault by an Islamic sect, officials said Sunday.

The attack Saturday night on the doctors in Potiskum, a town in Yobe state long under attack by the sect known as Boko Haram, happened a day after gunmen killed at least nine women administering polio vaccines in Kano, the major city of Nigeria’s predominantly Muslim north.

The two attacks have raised new questions over whether the extremist sect, targeted by Nigeria’s police and military, has picked a new soft target in its guerrilla campaign of shootings and bombings across the nation.

The attackers apparently struck at the North Korean doctors inside their home, said Dr. Mohammed Mamman, chairman of the Hospital Managing Board of Yobe State. The doctors had no security guards at their residence and typically traveled around the city via three-wheel taxis without a police escort, officials said.

By the time soldiers arrived at the house, they found the doctors’ wives cowering in a flower bed outside their home. At the property, they found the corpses of the men, all bearing what appeared to be machete wounds.

An Associated Press journalist later saw the North Korean doctors’ corpses before they were moved to nearby Bauchi state for safe keeping. Two of the men had their throats slit. Attackers beheaded the other doctor.

The doctors lived in a quiet neighborhood filled with other modest homes in the town. There wasn’t room to house them at the hospital, where they would have had some security protection, Mamman said.

Initially, doctors at the hospital who worked with the physicians identified them as being from South Korea, while police identified the dead as being from China. Ultimately, Mamman said those killed were from North Korea and had lived in the state since 2005 as part of a technical exchange program between the state and the North Korean government.

There are more than a dozen other North Korean doctors posted to the state under the program, as well as engineers, Mamman said. Security forces will immediately begin providing protection for them, he said.

Yobe state police commissioner Sanusi Rufai confirmed the attack took place and said officers had begun an investigation. Rufai said officers had made 10 arrests after the killings, though police in Nigeria routinely round up those living around the site of a crime, even if there is no evidence suggesting their complicity.

No one claimed responsibility for the attack, though suspicion fell on the Boko Haram sect.

Boko Haram, whose name means “Western education is sacrilege,” has been attacking government buildings and security forces over the past year and a half, and before that the group claimed responsibility for the bombings of several churches in Nigeria. In 2012 alone, the group was blamed for killing at least 792 people, according to an AP count.

Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency did not immediately report the three doctors’ deaths Sunday.

No group has yet claimed responsibility for Friday’s attack on polio vaccinators in Kano either, but it follows purported Boko Haram attacks focusing on “softer” targets, such as lightly guarded mobile-phone towers.

The mobile-phone tower attacks have limited the ability of residents and security forces to call for help during attacks and have cut the government’s ability to use the signals to track suspected militants.

In a statement Friday, President Goodluck Jonathan condemned the killings of the polio workers and promised that efforts to cut child mortality wouldn’t be stopped by “mindless acts of terrorism.” Information for this article was contributed by Jon Gambrell and Hyung-jin Kim of The Associated Press.

Front Section, Pages 4 on 02/11/2013

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