Explosions and gunfire have been heard coming from the airport in Niger’s capital, Niamey, residents have told the BBC.<\/p>\n
“I heard the first gunshots at 06:00 (05:00 local time) while I was at the mosque. But the current situation is under control,”<\/strong> one person said.<\/p>\n The gunfire, which lasted for two hours, came from the entrance to the airport, a witness told the AFP news agency.<\/p>\n Niger has been fighting a militant Islamist insurgency for a decade and in January suspected jihadists launched an attack on the same airport. Like its neighbours, Burkina Faso and Mali, Niger is run by a military junta that came to power in part because of the failure to deal with the violence.<\/p>\n Residents have told the BBC that Thursday’s attack was repelled by the army, which is now hunting down the fleeing assailants who reportedly abandoned their weapons.<\/p>\n The authorities have not yet commented and no group has said it was responsible. But an affiliate to the Islamic State group said it had carried out January’s assault.<\/p>\n Mustaqbal<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Explosions and gunfire have been heard coming from the airport in Niger’s capital, Niamey, residents have told the BBC. “I heard the first gunshots at 06:00 (05:00 local time) while I was at the mosque. But the current situation is under control,” one person said. The gunfire, which lasted for two hours, came from the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":95276,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mustaqbalmedia.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95275"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mustaqbalmedia.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mustaqbalmedia.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mustaqbalmedia.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mustaqbalmedia.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95275"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mustaqbalmedia.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95275\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":95277,"href":"https:\/\/mustaqbalmedia.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95275\/revisions\/95277"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mustaqbalmedia.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/95276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mustaqbalmedia.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mustaqbalmedia.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mustaqbalmedia.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}