JOS, Nigeria — Rescue workers armed with body bags today dug into the rubble of buildings destroyed by two car bombs in a central Nigerian city as people searched for loved ones missing in the market attack that killed at least 118.

Most victims are women and children vendors, said Mohammed Abdulsalam of the National Emergency Management Agency.

“We expect to find more bodies in the rubble,” Abdulsalam said.

“Allahu akhbar!” some young Muslim men yelled provocatively at an AP photographer near the scene, using the war cry of Islamic militants that means “God is great” within hearing of soldiers at a checkpoint.

Jos is tense with fears the attack blamed on Islamic extremists could inflame religious rivalry. The city in central Nigeria sits on a volatile fault line dividing Nigeria’s mainly Muslim north from the predominantly Christian south and has been a flashpoint in the past for deadly conflict between adherents of the two religions. Boko Haram, the group suspected in the attack, wants to impose an Islamic state under strict Shariah law in Nigeria, though half the country’s 170 million people are Christians.

Officials in at least three other central and central-north states have suggested the extremists are feeding into local tribal and religious tensions to spread the insurgency from its stronghold in the northeast into an area where thousands have been killed in recent years in disputes over land, water, religion and tribe.

At the Jos marketplace, earthmovers demolished buildings weakened by the blasts and resultant fires and moved heavy debris, allowing rescuers to search for more bodies.