More than 70 people have been killed in two blasts that
rocked a crowded bus station on the outskirts of Nigeria's capital, Abuja, an
official says.
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.
Eyewitnesses say there are dead bodies scattered around the
area.
This may have been another attack by the Islamist militant
group known as Boko Haram, correspondents say.
Abbas Idris, head of the Abuja Emergency Relief Agency, told
the BBC that so far they have confirmed 71 people dead and 124 injured.
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.
The explosions were powerful, destroying a number of
vehicles at Nyanya Motor Park
'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.
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