"Three customs officers were seriously injured in the attack while two child vendors -- both of them girls -- were killed in the blast," the commander of the city`s joint task force, general Jack Okechukwu Nwobo, told AFP.
Residents and witnesses put the death toll at about a dozen, however.
"I was about 100 metres (yards) from the customs bridge roundabout when the blast happened. It was a crowded area. I saw two vans conveying the dead. From my estimation, not less than 10 people were killed in the blast," a resident near the scene, Sheu Abdulkadir, told AFP.
A local journalist said he saw several dead bodies on the ground after the blast.
"I escaped death by the whiskers. I had just negotiated the roundabout when the blast happened. I saw many lifeless bodies on the ground. I counted at least 12," said the journalist, who did not want to be named.
The exact nature of the blast was not immediately known. Security agents cordoned off the site of the explosion.
Nobody immediately claimed responsibility for the blast, which came less than 24 hours after suspected Islamists of the Boko Haram sect tossed bombs and fired on a crowded beer garden killing at least 25 people.
Amnesty International condemned the attack.
"Several people were injured in a fresh bombing on Monday, also believed to have been carried out by Boko Haram," the organisation said in a statement.
Sunday`s attack was one of the deadliest in the city in recent months and coincided with the day a special task force of crack troops and other security personnel took control of security operations in the city.
Two men riding motorbikes hurled three bombs into a large beer garden, fired shots and sped away after the shock attack, security sources told AFP by telephone from Maiduguri, capital of Borno State.
Boko Haram, which staged a short-lived uprising in 2009, is blamed for almost daily attacks that have targeted mainly police and military personnel, politicians, and community and religious leaders.
The group claimed responsibility for the attack 11 days ago on police headquarters in the Nigerian capital Abuja that killed at least two, including a policeman, saying their target was the national police chief.
The sect also said it was behind an attack on a beer garden in a military barracks in northern Bauchi city that killed more than a dozen people hours after the inauguration of President Goodluck Jonathan.
Boko Haram, whose name means "Western education is a sin", launched an uprising in 2009 which was put down by a brutal military assault that left hundreds dead, most of them its members.
(AK/K004)
Editor: Kunto Wibisono
Copyright © ANTARA 2011
