Suspected Boko Haram militants attacked three villages in Nigeria, killing 48 people, residents said, as rescue workers in the central city of Jos searched rubble for the missing a day after two car bombs killed at least 118.
One of the villages that was attacked on Tuesday night and early Wednesday lies near the town of Chibok, where more than 300 schoolgirls were kidnapped last month.
The reports came from residents and were confirmed by a state security agent who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Apagu Maidaga, of Alagarno village, said residents hid in the bush and watched while the extremists set their homes of thatched mud huts ablaze.
"We saw our village up in flames as we hid in the bush waiting for the dawn; we lost everything," he told AP.
In Jos, where 118 people were killed in Tuesday's twin car-bomb attacks on a bustling bus terminal and a market, rescue workers armed with body bags were digging into the rubble of destroyed buildings on Wednesday.
Most victims were women and children working in the market, said Mohammed Abdulsalam of the national emergency management agency. "We expect to find more bodies in the rubble," he said.
Jos is tense with fears that the attack blamed on Islamic extremists could inflame religious rivalry. The city in central Nigeria sits on a volatile faultline dividing Nigeria's mainly Muslim north from the predominantly Christian south and has been a flashpoint in the past for deadly conflict between the two religions.
Boko Haram, the group suspected in the attack, wants to impose an Islamic state under strict sharia law in Nigeria, though half of the country's 170 million people are Christians.
Officials in at least three other central and central-north states have suggested that the extremists are exploiting local tribal and religious tensions to spread the insurgency from its stronghold in the north-east into an area where thousands have been killed in recent years in disputes over land, water, religion and tribe.
President Goodluck Jonathan indicated that he blamed Boko Haram for Tuesday's attack, assuring Nigerians that their government "remains fully committed to winning the war against terror." Jonathan has been saying that for years, despite the lack of results.
A Nigerian army spokesman, Brig Gen Olajide Laleye also insisted that victory was close on Wednesday, dismissing reports of troops suffering from low morale and lack of basic equipment including bullet-proof vests.
But the death toll and frequency of extremist attacks have increased this year, with more than 2,000 killed in the insurgency compared with an estimated 3,600 between 2010 and 2013.
Boko Haram's five-year-old uprising has grabbed international attention with the abduction of nearly 300 schoolgirls who the extremists are threatening to sell into slavery.
