As Gunmen Kill 45 in Nigeria, Suspicion Falls on Militants ABUJA, Nigeria - Gunmen stormed a village in northeastern Nigeria late Sunday afternoon, shooting down traders and shoppers and killing at least 45 people on a busy market day, the police and witnesses said on Monday. The attack was one of the deadliest yet to be attributed to the militant Islamist group Boko Haram. The attack occurred in Kawuri, a village about 20 miles from Maiduguri, the group's birthplace. After years of campaigns by the Nigerian military to eradicate it, Boko Haram has regrouped in the surrounding countryside. The attack on Sunday was thought to have been mounted from the nearby Sambisa Forest, an area considered to be one of the group's principal remaining redoubts, despite an extended bombing campaign by the Nigerian military. "It is among the worst attacks we've had," Lawan Tanko, commissioner of the Borno State police, said in a telephone interview on Monday evening. What is the motive, and how did they enter the village? We are still taking stock of the actual number of people killed. Boko Haram has become less active in the heavily policed cities, where networks of local police informers have made life difficult for the group. But it has continued indiscriminate killing in the villages of the northeast. Thousands of residents have fled from the area to neighboring countries, especially Niger, to escape both the terror attacks and the military bombing. In Kawuri, witnesses said that as many as 50 gunmen entered the village around 5 p.m. Sunday, riding on pickup trucks and motorcycles. They surrounded the market, an important trading center for grains and livestock that was crowded at the time, and began shooting; then the gunmen set the village ablaze, burning dozens of houses, the witnesses said. Kawuri was attacked once before, in October, when Boko Haram militants fought with a vigilante group that has been successful in keeping the group at bay in Maiduguri. Because Boko Haram has destroyed cellphone towers in the area, it was impossible to reach villagers there by phone on Monday evening. The police commissioner said he was not yet ready to say who was responsible for the latest attack. "We want to know if it is Boko Haram or otherwise - we can't say precisely," he said, adding that his investigators were in the village on Monday. Others said the attack bore all the militant group's hallmarks. "The Boko Haram were there," said Maikaramba Saddiq of Nigeria's Civil Liberties Organization in Maiduguri. And they burned the whole village.