THREE FEMALE SUICIDE BOMBERS KILL TWO IN BORNO

Three female suicide bombers killed two people and injured six others in an attack on a village in northeast Nigeria's Borno state, a police spokesman said on Tuesday.

Nobody has claimed responsibility for the attack but it bears the hallmarks of Islamist militant group Boko Haram, whose heartland is Borno and which often uses women for suicide attacks.

Borno state police spokesman Victor Isuku said the bombers detonated their explosives on Monday night in Mandarari Ward, Konduga Local Government Area, some 36 km (22 miles) from state capital Maiduguri, at about 9:30 p.m. (2030 GMT).

Although Nigeria's army has pushed out Boko Haram from most of a swathe of land in the north that it controlled at the start of 2015, suicide attacks and gun raids in some parts of Borno have increased since the end of the rainy season late last year.

The military says the start of the rainy season in a few weeks' time will probably reduce the militants' movement and activity.

Boko Haram has killed more than 20,000 people and forced more than 2 million to flee their homes since 2009 in an insurgency aimed at creating an Islamic caliphate in the northeast of Africa's most populous nation. (REUTERS)