Nigeria bus station blast kills 40 people

YOLA: A roadside bomb tore through a bus station near a busy junction in northeast Nigeria on Thursday, killing 40 people including five soldiers, witnesses and a security source on the scene said.

The security source and witness Abubakar Adamu, a mechanic who narrowly avoided being blown up himself, said the blast set several buses on fire at the Marabi-Mubi junction, in a part of the country plagued by violence linked to the Boko Haram insurgency.

"There were bodies everywhere on the ground," Adamu said.

The location is about 30 km (20 miles) west of Mubi, a town near the Cameroon border seized last month by Boko Haram militants fighting to carve an Islamic state out of religiously-mixed Nigeria. It has since been recaptured.

Nigerian authorities, who rarely remark on security developments in the troubled northeast, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. (Reuters)