A crowd at a Nigerian market has beaten to death a teenage girl accused of being a suicide bomber and then set her body on fire, police said.

Boko Haram staged an overnight assault on a border town in Niger and a suicide bomber detonated explosives near a market in the same town a few hours later, witnesses said.

Suspected Boko Haram Islamist fighters from Nigeria kidnapped around 80 people, many of them children, and killed three others yesterday in a cross-border attack on villages in northern Cameroon, army and government officials said.

At least 50 alleged insurgents were killed during clashes with Nigerian soldiers as security forces repelled an attack on a military base in the north-eastern state of Borno.