Two Nigerian girls, aged seven or eight, blew themselves up in a suicide bomb attack in a market in northeastern Nigeria on Sunday. They killed themselves and injured 17 others.
The girls were "seven or eight", a local militia member in Maiduguri, Abdulkarim Jabo, told AFP.
The town is the epicentre of the Boko Haram jihadist group, which had abducted 200 schoolgirls in 2014.
Emergency services arrived at the spot after the attack. They confirmed that 17 were injured. Jabo said he saw the girls on Sunday right before the explosion took place in Maiduguri.
"They got out of a rickshaw and walked right in front of me without showing the slightest sign of emotion," he said.
"I tried to speak with one of them, in Hausa and in English, but she didn't answer. I thought they were looking for their mother," he added. "She headed toward the poultry sellers, and then detonated her explosives belt."
Though the attack was not claimed by Boko Haram, it reportedly had signs of being one of theirs. The jihadist group uses women and young girls regularly to carry out suicide attacks.
On Friday, 45 people had died and 33 others were wounded in another double suicide attack carried out by female bombers in the northeast, AFP reported.
Boko Haram has pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group and calls itself the al-Wilāyat al-Islāmiyya Gharb Afrīqiyyah. They have attacked military forces of Nigeria repeatedly over the last two years causing mass casualties.
