Bombs at mosque, restaurant kill 44

Two bombs blamed on the Islamic extremist group Boko Haram exploded at a crowded mosque and an elite Muslim restaurant in Nigeria's central city of Jos, killing 44 people, officials said Monday.

Sixty-seven other people were wounded in the attacks on Sunday night and were hospitalized, said National Emergency Management Agency coordinator Abdussalam Mohammed.

"At the moment we have 44 dead bodies and 47 others injured from the scenes of the two attacks," he said.

Earlier, police in Plateau state, of which Jos is the capital, said at least 18 people had lost their lives in Sunday night's attacks at a shopping complex and near a popular mosque.

Discrepancies in death tolls are not unusual in Nigeria. The police, military and government authorities have previously downplayed casualties in the Boko Haram insurgency.

Violent hot spot

The explosion at the Yantaya Mosque came as leading cleric Sani Yahaya of the Jama'atu Izalatul Bidia organization, which preaches peaceful coexistence of all religions, was addressing a crowd during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, according to survivors who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

Another bomb exploded at Shagalinku, a restaurant patronized by state governors and other elite politicians seeking specialties from Nigeria's mainly Muslim north.

Jos is a hot spot for violent religious confrontations, located in the center of the country, where Nigeria's majority Muslim north and mainly Christian south collide. The city has been targeted in the past by bomb blasts, claimed by Boko Haram extremists, that have killed hundreds of people.

Sunday's attacks are the latest in a series blamed on Boko Haram. The attacks have killed more than 200 people over the past week in northeast Nigeria.

The extremists returned on Sunday to northeastern villages attacked three days earlier, killing nine villagers and burning down 32 churches and about 300 homes, said Stephen Apagu, chairman of a vigilante self-defense group in Borno state's Askira-Uba local government area.

He said the vigilantes killed three militants.

AP - AFP