Arsenal plan pre-season game in Nigeria
Reuters - Friday 04 May 2012, 10:15
Arsenal are planning to visit
Africa for the first time in 19 years by travelling to troubled
Nigeria for a pre-season friendly.
The opposition for the August 5 match is not yet known but is
likely to be a leading African national team, the London club
said on their website on Friday.
The friendly will be played at the 60,000-capacity Abuja
National Stadium.
Arsenal, who are also planning pre-season games in China,
Malaysia and Hong Kong, last visited Africa for a tour of South
Africa in 1993.
The Islamist group Boko Haram has been fighting a low-level
insurgency in Nigeria for more than two years.
Although its attacks are mostly in the north of Africa's
most populous nation it has bombed several targets in the
capital Abuja, located in the centre of the country.
The office of local newspaper This Day was hit on April 26
by a car bomb and last year United Nations headquarters and the
office of the chief of police were struck by suicide bombers.
The sect, which wants to impose an Islamic state on
Nigeria's evenly mixed population of Muslims and Christians, has
been blamed for hundreds of killings since its uprising against
the government in 2009.