Photo: 6year old Magdalene & Elder Sister Sonia were Killed in the Kano Bomb Blast

Poor innocent young girls, 6 year old Magdalene Stephen (left) and 13 year old Sonia Stephen (right) were killed in the Kano bomb blast last Sunday. May their souls rest in perfect peace.   Magdalene Stephen was often the first thing her father would see when he woke up. The 6-year-old girl took delight in stirring her father from sleep to nuzzle in for a hug.

“Magdalene was my heart,” Stephen Wogor said, his voice starting to crack. “My heart is now broken. I cannot do anything without her again. They took my joy.” Magdalene and her older sister, Sonia, were killed Sunday evening in a suicide car bombing in Kano, Nigeria’s most heavily populated northern city. The girls were helping their mother at a nearby roasted fish stand when the car exploded.Wogor sprinted from his own stand, where he peddles instant noodles, to his daughters splayed on the street among the smouldering debris.
He wrapped his arms around Sonia, his 13-year-old. Her skull was split and her legs broken. Blood leaked from her stomach.
“I knew she was not alive but I still took her to the hospital,” her father said.He ran back to the carnage to find his Magdalene — his heart, his joy. She writhed on the ground, missing part of a leg, but alive. He rushed her to the hospital.

“The injuries were too bad,” he said, crying through the phone.
Police arrested two men Monday in connection with the bomb blast that killed five, including the suicide bomber, Agence France-Presse reported.People detained the men in a bus station after overhearing the pair talk about Sunday’s deadly blast. Boko Haram, an Islamic militant group, had previously bombed the same bus station.Wogor, like many in Kano, says Boko Haram targeted his neighbourhood because it is an enclave filled with Christians in a predominantly Muslim state. Sabon Gari, known as the “foreign district,” is home to many restaurants and clubs whose clients openly disobey the state’s sharia law.
“It was a Boko Haram attack. They do not like us because we’re Christians,” Wogor said.A car bomb exploded in the Christian neighborhood of Nigeria's second most populous and mainly Muslim city of Kano on Sunday night, killing at least four people, police said. Five people were wounded.

Sonia was a studious child who dreamed of being a doctor, her father said. She volunteered to do chores at home and was always the first to help her mother roast fish to sell.Magdalene, the youngest of Wogor’s six children, was his favourite. They did everything together, he said, from eating to sleeping, her slim frame burrowed in his chest.They had just finished eating together Sunday night when Magdalene ran outside to visit her mother’s stall.The ground near the blast is now stained from fire and blood. The walls of a nearby building are pocked with shrapnel, a witness said.Police in Kano on Monday found an abandoned Mitsubishi station wagon wired with cables, two gas tanks and a gallon of petroleum stored in the back. The bomb was never detonated.
Wogor no longer feels safe in the city where he has lived for 28 years.“I don’t know what will happen next,” he said. “The best plan I have is leave to protect my family.