Helena Nawaz, who had been taken to the hospital with head and arm injuries, said she had been sitting along a wall and “it felt like I saw something.”
“Then I heard a bang. I couldn’t reach my husband, but a woman, identified as a nurse, who was nearby, ran over to call the emergency personnel to help. Then I asked myself: Are you seriously going to go back to work?” she said.
The injured included a number of senior police officials, a doctor and a retired medical officer.
Tashimre hospital, which was shut down, opened late in the day on Tuesday.
There were no reports of any casualties from other attacks on medical facilities in the region in the past 24 hours, said the spokesman for the Central Emergency Operations Centre, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
The government has blamed Boko Haram for about half of the 585 people killed in the year since the radical Islamist group began its insurgency in Nigeria. The military has carried out some 6,550 military operations in the northeast, where the militants are based in Adamawa state, which borders Cameroon.
Boko Haram has also killed at least 30 government troops since Oct. 25, 2014, when Abu Musab al-Barnawi, leader of the group, declared a caliphate in the north. The military has also conducted a number of bomb attacks against government troops, mostly the first time Boko Haram attacked government forces.
As troops continue to retrain and resupply for a possible assault on the militants, the situation on the ground is slowly improving, with Nigeria’s state of emergency declared a week ago and troops taking part in regular training exercises near the town of Baga in Borno state.
In Cameroon, Prime Minister Tifonckx said on Thursday that the military had seized control of around 100 square kilometers (45 square miles) of territory controlled by the radicals.
“We have arrested some leaders of Boko Haram, and in some cases, we have killed their commanders,” Tifonckx told the regional news agency, the Reuters news agency reported. There was no immediate reaction from Nigeria’s military in Baga.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, Cameroon’s prime minister, Paul Biya, said that Boko Haram “has become bigger than al Qaeda.”
Tensions between the regional states