More than 40 people people have been killed after a suicide car bombing hit a military camp in the northern Malian city of Gao, according to government officials.

President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita declared a three-day mourning period following Wednesday’s attack, the worst in years.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast, which killed at least 47 people, including five suicide bombers, and wounded a further 115, according to army spokesman Diarran Kone.

 The morning explosion hit the Joint Operational Mechanism base in Gao, home to Malian soldiers and hundreds of former fighters who had signed a 2015 peace agreement with the government.

Sadou Maiga, a doctor at Gao’s hospital, told The Associated Press news agency that all other hospital activities had ceased with dozens of wounded victims arriving.

“Some have died from their wounds, and others are in a very grave state,” he said. “At this point, it’s not the toll of dead and injured that interests me, it’s saving who I can.”

Witnesses said the car bearing explosives breached the camp at around 9am, just as hundreds of fighters were gathering for a meeting.

The suicide bomber “succeeded in tricking soldiers’ vigilance” and penetrated the camp, said Kone.

The attack came just days after Francois Hollande, the French president, visited the camp.

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France sent troops to Mali at the request of the government there in early 2013 to prevent an advance by armed rebels on the capital Bamako.

Gao – seized by armed groups in 2012 before French forces drove them out a year later – is considered the best-secured town in northern Mali with multiple UN, French and Malian army checkpoints along main roads.

However, the offices of the UN peacekeeping mission located next to the airport terminal were razed by a truck-bomb explosion last month.

Last year, Mali’s government signed a peace deal with secular armed groups, but fighters pledging allegiance to both al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group have fought on and launched dozens of attacks on Western targets in recent months.

In December, a female French aid worker was  kidnapped in Gao .

Corinne Dufka, an associate director for Human Rights Watch (HRW) who oversees Mali issues, told Al Jazeera the latest attack “was very bad news for Mali and for the international community who have put a tremendous effort in trying to put Mali back together after the spectacular collapse in 2012”.

She cited main points outlined in the HRW’s latest report on human rights abuses in Mali.

“There has abeen a continuing growing presence of armed groups in northern Mali and central Mali, where I documented 27 executions by armed groups against those accused of being informants for government,” she said.

“We also talk about the ongoing concerns of abuses of the Mali security forces. They have improved over the past years, but nevertheless these abuses create support for the Islamist groups that use it as a rationale to recruit,” she added.

“There have also been abuses by peacekeepers whose mandate is to ensure civilian protection.”

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Source: Al Jazeera and news agencies