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Four people were wounded by the explosion of a homemade bomb in an English-speaking neighbourhood of Cameroon’s capital Yaounde, witnesses and a police officer said Friday.
The blast in Yaounde, which has been mostly spared the violence of the anglophone revolt in the country’s west and the Islamist insurgency in its north, took place on Thursday evening.
The bomb was made from a motorcycle battery, a pressure cooker and nails, the police officer said on condition of anonymity.
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It had been placed at the bottom of a pole fitted with a video surveillance camera at a roundabout in the Rond Point Damase neighbourhood.
Pictures of the explosion’s aftermath, verified by witnesses of the blast, were shared widely on social media.
“I was taking care of a patient in the early evening when I heard a loud noise: ‘boom’,” said Simeon Awoiakia, who works at a healthcare centre near the blast site.
“It was a panic. Shortly after, I saw people rescuing a burnt woman,” he added.
There was a heavy security presence at the roundabout on Friday, an AFP journalist said.
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Dozens of people were loaded onto three police trucks, while witnesses said that more arrests had been made earlier.
Two makeshift bombs exploded in Yaounde last month, according to an internal police note seen by AFP. The note requested that officers increase searches of taxis and the homes of suspects.
The West African country is fighting two bloody conflicts at once.
In its two western anglophone regions, a three-year separatist revolt rages on, rooted in resentment among the English-speaking minority in the francophone-majority country.
The fighting between the separatist and the country’s armed forces has left 3,000 dead and forced nearly 700,000 to flee their homes.
In the far north, brutal attacks by Boko Haram jihadists are on the rise, after the group spilled over the border from Nigeria.
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