MAIDUGURI - Multiple explosions from suspected suicide bombers rocked the northeastern Nigerian city of Maiduguri on Monday evening, police said, on the back of an overnight attack on a military post.
Combined with the attack on the military position the evening prior and a mosque bombing in December, the assaults have wrecked a years-long peaceful stretch in the city, which had become a relative oasis of calm as Nigeria's long-running insurgency was pushed to the rural hinterlands.
An AFP reporter at a city hospital saw dozens of wounded people seeking treatment from Monday's blasts, as well as multiple bodies covered by sheets on the sidewalk outside, though no death toll was immediately available.
"I heard a heavy explosion and later realised it was a bomb," Alhaji Bukar Grema, who owns a phone shop near one of the blast sites and helped evacuate the victims, told AFP.
Dauda Iliya, a media aide to the Borno State government, said authorities were working to confirm casualties from the explosions at the city's main market and the University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital.
Borno state police said that explosives clearance teams were at the three scenes "following three suspected suicide bomb events."
Fighters from Boko Haram and rival jihadist group Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) have recently stepped up attacks in northeastern Nigeria.
Their 16-year campaign to establish a caliphate in the country has killed more than 40,000 people and displaced around two million.
Borno State Governor Babagana Zulum called the apparent bombings "barbaric" and said "the recent surge in attacks is not unconnected with intense military operations in the Sambisa forest," a known jihadist stronghold.
Iliya called for "increased vigilance," especially as residents prepare to celebrate the end of Ramadan this week.
Roads leading to the site of the market blast were closed by security forces on Monday evening, an AFP reporter saw.
The earlier attack was launched around midnight Sunday into Monday, on a Nigerian military post in Ajilari Cross district, a southwestern suburb of Maiduguri and just a few kilometres from the city's airport.
That same evening, there was an attack in the Damboa local government area, south of Maiduguri.