The northeast Nigeria town of Chibok used to fill up before Christmas as people returned home to visit their families, but with the 219 schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram still missing, few feel like celebrating this year.

Nigerians were forced to recall the April 14 mass abduction in Chibok this week, following news that another 185 people, mostly women and children, were seized in the nearby town of Gumsuri in another attack blamed on the Islamists.

Mohammed Bako stared out at the teeming Jimeta market in Nigeria's Yola city, looking for anything suspicious amongst the hawkers selling cheap phones and cars attempting near impossible turns down narrow alleys.

Bako runs a box-size phone shop in the market, but 18 months ago took on a new job as head of the local vigilante force working with the military against Boko Haram.

Boko Haram has kidnapped at least 185 people, including women and children, in northeast Nigeria, the latest mass abduction in a region where the military has repeatedly struggled to protect civilians, officials and witnesses said Thursday.

The attack, conducted Sunday by well-armed Islamist extremists in the town of Gumsuri, also killed 32 people. It recalled the April kidnappings in Chibok, where more than 200 girls were taken from a school.

A Nigerian military court on Wednesday sentenced 54 soldiers to death for mutiny after they refused to deploy for an operation against Boko Haram Islamists in the northeast, their lawyer said.

"They sentenced 54 to death and acquitted five," said prominent human rights lawyer Femi Falana, following a court martial that began on October 15 and was conducted behind closed doors. 

Nigeria's opposition party on Wednesday chose Yemi Osibajo, a Christian pastor and ex-Lagos state justice commissioner, as its vice presidential nominee for February 14 polls, in a move to reach across religious lines in this deeply divided country.

French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian on Monday urged African nations to combine efforts to tackle the jihadist threat, from southern Libya to Nigeria.

"Cooperation must become the rule and no longer the exception," Le Drian said at the opening of the first International Forum on Peace and Security in Africa, in Senegal's capital Dakar.

Nine illegal migrants from Niger were killed in a traffic accident in Algeria Sunday when their bus and a truck collided as they were being repatriated, the APS news agency reported.

A gas cylinder exploded at a refueling station in southwest Nigeria, injuring several people and razing many houses, police and residents said on Sunday.

"I am now at the scene of the incident. Nobody died, but several people were injured and many houses were burnt," Ondo State police spokesman Felix Ogodo told Agence France Presse.

One of Nigeria's most powerful Muslim leaders, the emir of Kano, has expressed optimism that the Boko Haram insurgency which has claimed some 13,000 lives will soon be over.

"I say help is on the way. Terror must and will be defeated," Muhammad Sanusi II tweeted late Saturday. "All it requires is the good leaders, uncommon courage and unrelenting determination, and victory will be ours."

Dauda Bello came face-to-face with Boko Haram militants but managed to escape their hail of bullets, fleeing to safety after a marathon drive on a brutal mountain road.

"It was terrible... (Boko Haram) was firing in every direction," he told AFP in Yola, the capital of northeast Nigeria's Adamawa state, where he fled from the town of Mubi in late October.