A car bomb exploded Saturday in a government-held neighborhood in the central Syrian city of Homs, killing at least 16 people and wounding dozens, state media and an opposition monitoring group said.

State news agency SANA had earlier said the blast wounded more than 100 people while the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said dozens were hurt.

A vehicle bomb detonated close to a hospital in the mainly Alawite neighbourhood of al-Zahra in the east of Homs city, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said.

“The explosion was terrifying. Body parts were on the ground … it was one of the biggest explosions to hit Homs,” a 28-year-old woman working in a neighbourhood coffee shop said.

“The blast left a huge crater, and people were running in every direction in fear of more explosions,” she added.

The second large blast, originally suspected to have been a bomb, appeared to have come from an exploding gas canister and wounded people who had come to tend to victims of the first explosion in the densely-populated neighbourhood, state media said.

A second blast was heard in the city, but its cause was unclear, the Observatory said.

Syria’s civil war has killed more than 250,000 people and wounded a million.