It was a day of trouble and horror.

As early as 9 a.m. on May 17, Bashir had already seen up to four corpses pulled out of the wreckage of a building that once stood in the Sabon Gari area of Nigeria’s populous northern Kano state. He’d seen crying children in bloodied uniforms spilling onto the streets. He’d seen body parts scattered around those same streets and agonized families searching for their loved ones.

The businessman, who asked me only to use his first name, had been on his way to work when a blast thundered through the dense neighborhood. He rushed towards the sound, recorded the carnage on his phone and posted the footage on Twitter.

Eyewitnesses told him how minutes before, a suspected suicide bomber, who, failing to get past a primary school gate, detonated the explosives in a structure opposite the school. “Bomb blast in Kano,” Bashir tweeted.