Car bomb kills 19

Photo: The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

FILE - In this Monday April 21, 2014 file photo, four female students of government secondary school Chibok, who were abducted by gunmen and reunited with their families walk in Chibok, Nigeria. (AP Photo/ Haruna Umar, File)

The death toll from a car bomb that exploded on a busy road in Nigeria's capital rose to at least 19 overnight with 66 people wounded, police said Friday from the city that within days hosts an international conference.

The bomb was driven near a checkpoint where traffic built up, located across the road from a busy bus station where a massive explosion on April 14 killed at least 75 people. That blast was claimed by the Islamic extremist Boko Haram terrorist network in a video April 19 that threatened further assaults.

In a separate development, police said the number of missing girls kidnapped from a school by the zealots has risen to 276 — an increase of more than 30 over the previous estimate.

Police Commissioner Tanko Lawan said the actual number of girls and young women abducted the night of April 14 was more than 300, with the number who have escaped also rising, to 53.

He told a news conference Thursday night in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state in the northeast, that the figures keep increasing because students from other schools were brought into one school for final exams last month after all schools in Borno state were shut because of attacks by Islamic extremists.

Authorities had originally reported 129 girls kidnapped and the military had claimed to have freed all but eight of them — compounding confusion.

Unverified reports this week indicated some of the girls have been forced into "marriages" with their abductors and some have been taken across borders into Chad and Cameroon.

The attacks and the military's failure to rescue the teenagers have gravely undermined confidence in the government and the military, which had been claiming to have contained the 5-year-old Islamic uprising to a remote northeastern corner of the country.