YOLA/KANO: A bomb exploded in the main market in Nigeria’s northeastern city of Yola killing 45 people, Nigeria’s disaster response agency said Friday, in an attack blamed on the extremist Boko Haram group.

There was no claim of responsibility for the attack but it bore the hallmarks of militant group Boko Haram.

The suicide bomber struck at around 1900 GMT on Thursday in the Jimeta district of Yola, the capital of Adamawa state.

“Ten more people died this morning,” police spokesman Othman Abubakar told Reuters, adding to the 35 bodies that a senior policeman, who wanted to remain anonymous, earlier said he had seen at the bomb scene. Around 40 people were wounded, said Abubakar.

Boko Haram has waged a six-year insurgency to try to set up a “caliphate” in the northeast of Africa’s biggest oil exporting country, but government counter-offensives this year have retaken much of the territory held by the militant group.

But bomb attacks have resurged since the inauguration of newly elected President Muhammadu Buhari last week, with 80 people killed in a series of attacks over the past few days.

In his inaugural speech, Buhari promised to eradicate the “mindless, godless” group and rescue hundreds of women and children held captive by the terrorists, including 200 girls taken from the town of Chibok a year ago.

Buhari visited his counterparts in Niger and Chad earlier this week to discuss strategies against Boko Haram.

The insurgents controlled territory around the size of Belgium at the start of the year, but Nigeria’s military, aided by forces from neighbouring Chad, Niger and Cameroon, says it has since pushed Boko Haram back to the remote Sambisa forest.

Boko Haram denied any such battlefield reverses in a video aired on social media on Tuesday.

While Maiduguri residents have come to expect relentless bombings, a surge of violence in Yola will create new challenges for Buhari as he strives to pacify the northeast.

The city has been home to hundreds of thousands of people displaced by fighting elsewhere in the region.

Hundreds of women and children kidnapped by Boko Haram have also been brought to camps in the city after they were rescued during recent military operations in the rebels’ Sambisa Forest stronghold in Borno.

The violence on Thursday came as Buhari ended his first foreign trip since taking office. He visited Chad and Niger, which with Cameroon are Nigeria’s key allies in the battle against an Islamist uprising blamed for 15,000 deaths since 2009.

Buhari urged closer regional security cooperation, thanking troops from Nigeria’s neighbors for their efforts to date while demanding more action from a multi-national force battling the insurgents on the frontline.

He vowed to crush the militancy when he was sworn in one week ago but the spate of bombings through his first week in office highlighted the severity of the challenge.

Boko Haram has been weakened by a four-nation offensive launched in February but the extremists have proved resilient in the past.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility but the blast bore the hallmarks of Boko Haram who have frequently targeted crowded markets. It is the first such attack on Yola, which has had its population double with some 300,000 refugees fleeing the insurgent violence in the northeast that has killed some 13,000 people and forced 1.5 million from their homes.

Two hours earlier, eight soldiers were killed by a suicide car bomb a checkpoint outside a military barracks in Maiduguri, the biggest city in the northeast and the center of the conflict some 410 km northeast of Yola.