At lest ten people were killed on Wednesday in a suicide bombing against a mosque in northeast Nigeria, military officials and an aid worker said.
The attack took place in the town of Gamboru in Borno state, an epicenter of the conflict with Boko Haram extremists.
The bomber hit the mosque in Gamboru, near Nigeria’s border with Cameroon, during dawn prayers, said Ali Mustapha, an aid worker.
“I was on my way to dawn prayer, then I heard the sound of a loud bomb explosion inside the mosque,” Mustapha told Reuters.
“The mosque was destroyed and burnt,” he said. “After some hours, when we came to evacuation of the people, we saw 11 corpses, with the suicide bomber making (the total number of dead) 12.”
Bukar Jibril, a youth volunteer in Gamboru Ngala town, said nine bodies were found immediately after the blast and two other people died later, including the bomber.
Two other residents confirmed Wednesday's attack in Borno state.
Pictures of the aftermath of the blast showed the bodies of the dead uncovered and lined up on the ground. A building had been reduced to rubble, with only a few sections of wall left standing.
Nobody claimed responsibility for the attack, but it bears the hallmarks of Boko Haram, the extremist group which frequently uses suicide bombers, often women and girls, to attack crowded public spaces such as mosques and markets.
The Borno state government on Tuesday tightened a curfew and increased security checks around its capital, Maiduguri, after a resurgence of violence in the city where Boko Haram was formed.
Boko Haram's eight-year insurgency has killed tens of thousands of people.
Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari in his New Year's address again claimed that Boko Haram had been largely defeated. The group however continues to carry out lethal attacks on the military and civilians.
Last week four civilians were killed in an attack by suspected Boko Haram militants on Maiduguri, the Nigerian city at the center of the conflict with the extremists.
In November a suicide bomber killed at least 50 people in an attack on a mosque, in one of the deadliest bombings of recent years.
