BOKO HARAM leader Abubakar Shekau boasted today that his group was behind two explosions at a Lagos fuel depot which the government tried to cover up.

It would be the first reported bombing by Boko Haram in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital and probably the continent’s most populous city with 20 million people.

At least four people died in the June 25 blasts, including an alleged female suicide bomber.

Nigeria’s government, which often plays down insurgent attacks, said that there had been one explosion caused by a gas cylinder.

But locally-based diplomats insist there is clear evidence of a car bomb exploding on the crowded road outside the depot, and of a person at the entrance gate believed to be a woman wearing a suicide bomb vest.

“We were the ones that detonated bomb in Abuja, that corrupt city,” said the Boko Haram leader.

“We were responsible for the bomb in Kano, in Plateau. We were the ones that sent a female bomber to the refinery in Lagos.”

He repeated his demand that President Goodluck Jonathan release detained insurgents in exchange for more than 200 schoolgirls kidnapped three months ago.

“Nigerians are saying Bring Back Our Girls, and we are telling Jonathan to bring back our arrested warriors, our army,” he said in the video.

Pakistani education activist Malala Yousafzai, who is celebrating her 17th birthday in Nigeria, met President Jonathan yesterday, announcing that her birthday wish this year is “Bring Back Our Girls now and alive.”