UN Asha-Rose visits Nigeria bomb victims

Friday's car bomb blew out windows, gutted a lower floor and set the building alight in one of the most lethal attacks on the world body in its history.

There has been no confirmed claim of responsibility for the attack but security sources suspect the violent Islamist sect Boko Haram, which has been blamed for almost daily bomb and gun attacks on security forces and civilians in the northeast.

A UN spokesman accompanying Migiro at the hospital where the victims were being treated said the death toll had risen to 23, from an earlier estimate of 19 given by emergency services.

That would make it more deadly than the truck bomb attack on the UN headquarters in Baghdad in 2003 that killed 22 people, including UN envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello.

"We are working as a team to ensure that the injured do get all the treatment that they require," Migiro said after visiting the hospital, where she shook hands and patted the backs of the wounded.

"For people who had lost their lives we are working to see how they are going to be put to rest," she said.

Migiro was due to meet later on Sunday President Goodluck Jonathan, who visited the bomb site on Saturday but declined to speculate on who could be behind the attack.

If Boko Haram, whose name means "Western education is sinful" in the northern Hausa language, was responsible, it marks an increase in the sophistication of its attacks and an escalation from local to international targets.

Migiro said the bombing was "a shocking incident, an attack on global peace and communities."

"I have looked at the ripped-up gate. It is amazing how this happened and we are grappling with that, now an investigation is under way

We will see what we have to do better," added Migiro, who was accompanied by UN Security Chief Gregory Starr.

Most of the dead were Nigerian, but a Norway official confirmed one of its citizens was also killed. A UN official said he expected to be able to release the names and nationalities of the dead later on Sunday.

The car's driver died in the blast, possibly making it Nigeria's first suicide bombing.

The BBC said Boko Haram had contacted it to take responsibility for the attack, but such claims are hard to verify because the sect's command structure is opaque and many people claim to speak on its behalf.

Its activities have usually been confined to the remote northeast, on the threshold of the Sahara desert, where it has killed more than 150 people in bombings and shootings this year, although it claimed a car bomb at police headquarters in Abuja in June.

It says it wants Sharia law more widely applied in Nigeria, beyond the mostly Muslim north where some states have it, but until Friday had shown no interest in hitting Western targets.

Intelligence officials say they have evidence that some Boko Haram members have trained in Niger.

Jonathan tightened security after the attack and armed soldiers patrolled Abuja, searching cars at roadblocks across the city, which lies in the middle of the country where the mostly-Christian south and largely-Muslim north meet.

Security experts say many of Boko Haram's attacks are done by disillusioned youths, in a region that has much higher illiteracy, poverty and unemployment rates than the south.

A security source on Saturday told Reuters he suspects there may also be a political dimension to its growing attacks, suggesting they are being co-opted by northern politicians angry about Jonathan, a Christian southerner, winning April's poll.

Copyright Reuters, 2011