At least 47 people including five suicide bombers were killed when a vehicle packed with explosives detonated inside a military camp in the northern Mali city of Gao on Wednesday, the government said.

Army spokesman Diarran Kone said a further 115 people were wounded in the worst militant attack in years in the Saharan West African nation. 

A Reuters reporter who arrived at the camp soon after the blast, which occurred as hundreds of soldiers assembled at around 9 a.m (0900 GMT), said he saw dozens of bodies lying on the ground alongside the wounded.

Ambulances rushed to the scene and helicopters circled overhead as President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita declared three days of national mourning.

"It's terrible," Gao resident Kader Touré said. "The attack happened while they were having an assembly. I've just left the hospital where there were bodies ripped to pieces and wounded piled up."

The camp was home to government soldiers and members of various rival armed groups which are jointly patrolling Mali's restive desert north in line with a UN-brokered peace accord.

A French-led military intervention in 2013 drove back extremist militants, including Al Qaeda-linked groups, that had seized northern Mali a year earlier.

However, extremist militants still operate in the region and insecurity is aggravated by tensions between local rebel groups and pro-government militias.

French Interior Minister Bruno Le Roux described the blast as a "major and highly symbolic attack" in an area visited only days ago by President Francois Hollande.

Gao is a dusty town of 50,000 people on the banks of the Niger river.

Underscoring the dangers of trying to bring stability to the southern reaches of the Sahel, the offices of the UN peacekeeping mission in Gao were flattened by a truck bomb in December.

The MINUSMA mission has staff from 123 nations, costs $1 billion a year and is the United Nations' most dangerous deployment, with more than 100 casualties before Wednesday's blast.

In addition, France maintains a 4,000-strong parallel peacekeeping operation, "Barkhane" and the European Union has 580 instructors training the Malian army.

Before Wednesday's blast, the worst militant attack on the former French colony was a November 2015 assault by extremist gunmen on a Radisson hotel in the capital, Bamako, in which 20 people were killed.

Source :Times Of Oman