From BBC News
Abuja
More than 70 people have
been killed in two blasts that rocked a crowded bus station on the
outskirts of Nigeria's capital, Abuja, officials say. The blast happened as commuters were about to board buses and
taxis to go to work in central Abuja, the BBC's Haruna Tangaza reports.
Suspicion immediately fell on the Boko Haram Islamist militant group, which has staged previous attacks in Abuja. However, most of its attacks have been in the north-east of the country.
Abbas Idris, head of the Abuja Emergency Relief Agency, told the BBC that so far they have confirmed 71 people dead and 124 injured. Police spokesman Frank Mba gave the same figures, adding that 16 luxury coaches and 24 minibuses had been destroyed.
Eyewitness Badamasi Nyanya said he had seen 40 bodies being evacuated; other eyewitnesses say they saw rescue workers and police gathering body parts.
The blast ripped a hole four feet deep (1.2 metre) in the ground of Nyanya Motor Park, some 16km (10 miles) from the city centre, and destroyed more than 30 vehicles, causing secondary explosions as their fuel tanks ignited and burned, the Associated Press news agency reports. Ambulances have been taking the dead and injured to nearby hospitals.
'Terrible'
Eyewitness Mimi Daniels, who works in Abuja, said: "I was
waiting to get on a bus when I heard a deafening explosion then smoke,"
she told Reuters. "People were running around in panic."
Another eyewitness told the BBC: "I have never seen [anything] like that in my life. It was just terrible... We were just running helter-skelter. So somehow I think that they planted something inside one of the buses there. "So there are many dead shot down at the scene of the accident. And as you can see now some of these casualties... we are hoping, we are praying they will be ok. We saw some ambulances bringing corpses to other hospitals."
He added it was difficult to estimate how many had been killed in the attack, but that there were many.
This year, Boko Haram's fighters have killed more than 1,500 civilians in three states in north-east Nigeria, says the BBC's Will Ross in Lagos.
Boko Haram has hit Abuja several times before, including an attack on the United Nations building in 2011.
The Nigerian government had said the violence was now contained in a small area of the north-east.
Northeastern Nigeria
Gunmen have killed 135 civilians in north east Nigeria since Wednesday, a senior official from the region has told the BBC. Borno state senator Ahmed Zannah said the killings took place in at least three separate attacks in the state. The attackers are suspected to be from the Islamist Boko Haram movement.
At least 1,500 people, half of them civilian, have been killed in the restive north-eastern region this year, according to Amnesty International.
The organisation blamed both "an increase in attacks by Boko Haram and uncontrolled reprisals by Nigeria's security forces" for the high death toll.
Women 'abducted'
Senator Zannah said the attackers first target was a teacher training college in the town of Dikwa. They killed five people there and abducted several women, he said. The attackers burned down the college library before escaping, Mr Zannah said. The militants then attacked two villages near the border with Cameroon killing a further 130 people, the senator said.
The attacks took place on Wednesday and Thursday, with initial reports claiming around 70 people had been killed.
The Nigerian military has not yet commented on the attacks. A state of emergency has been in place since last year in the states of Borno, Yobe and Adamawa in north-east Nigeria.
Human rights groups have criticised both Boko Haram and Nigeria's military for failing to protect civilians.
Amnesty International said last month that Nigeria's army killed around 600 people after a Boko Haram attack.
Some 250,000 people have been forced to leave their homes because of the fighting, the Nigerian government's relief agency said. Boko Haram has waged an insurgency since 2009 to create a strict Islamic state in northern Nigeria.
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