Techniques for expanding the set of addressable interfering signals in an interference cancelling receiver are described, where the task of control message detection from interfering cells is integrated in an iterative receiver process where increasingly better a priori information on the received data signals from the previous iteration is used to detect additional control messages and successively grow the set of interfering signals included in the receiver's interference mitigation processing. In an example method, first estimated symbols for a desired signal are generated. A control channel corresponding to a first interfering signal is detected, where said detecting is based on the first estimated symbols. Signal characteristics information for the first interfering signal is then derived from the detected control channel signal, and used to generate second estimated symbols for the desired signal, using an interference-mitigation technique to mitigate the effects of the interfering signal.