The Guardian - Hundreds dead as more religious violence hits Nigeria

Attackers wielding machetes killed hundreds of people as further religious violence hit Nigeria yesterday following pre-dawn clashes between Islamist pastoralists and Christian villagers.

Bodies were reportedly piled in streets near the central city of Jos and Gregory Yenlong, a Plateau state official, said the death toll could be more than 500.

"Soldiers are patrolling and everywhere remains calm ... we are estimating 500 people killed but I think it should be a little bit above that," he added.

A police spokesman said the number of dead officially recorded so far stood at 55.

Some people were apparently burned to death and many others displaced as homes were razed to the ground.

Local aid agencies described the violence as a "reprisal" for sectarian clashes in January in which 300 people, most of them Muslims, died and Jos was put under military curfew.

Residents of Dogo Nahawa, a mainly Christian village about three miles south of Jos, said Islamist pastoralists from the surrounding hills had attacked at about 3am, firing guns into the air before slashing villagers with machetes.

"They came around three o'clock in the morning and started shooting into the air," Peter Jang, a village resident, said.

"The shooting was meant to bring people from their houses and then, when people came out, they started cutting them with machetes."

Yemi Kosoko, a reporter with the independent Nigerian news network Channels, said he had counted more than 200 bodies, mainly women and children who had been killed by blows from machetes.

Kosoko said he had made the count yesterday afternoon with an official from the state government. Military units began surrounding the affected villages at around the same time.

"This is an act of inhumanity," Da Buba Gyang, traditional ruler of the Christian Berom ethnic group in Jos, said.

A Reuters reporter who visited the village counted around 100 bodies, but said victims had also been brought to hospitals in Jos and some had been quickly buried, making it difficult for officials to assess the toll.

Pam Dantong, medical director of Plateau state hospital in Jos, showed reporters 18 bodies, some charred, that had been brought from Dogo Nahawa. Officials said other bodies had been taken to a second hospital in the state capital.

Robin Waubo, a spokesman for the Red Cross in Nigeria, said he was aware of 50 confirmed fatalities but added that Red Cross staff were still visiting hospitals.

"It seems like they were reprisal attacks from what happened a few weeks ago," he said. "The fighting now seems to have calmed down and the military has been deployed to resolve the situation.

"We know people have been slashed by machetes and others have sustained injuries as they tried to flee."

A Red Cross official in the nearby state of Bauchi said more than 600 people had fled to makeshift camps there to escape the violence.

Sectarian violence in this region of Nigeria has killed thousands during the past decade.

Jos lies at the crossroads of Nigeria's Muslim north and predominantly Christian south. In November 2008, clashes between Muslim and Christian gangs, triggered by a disputed local election, resulted in the deaths of at least 700 people.

The instability underlines the fragility of Africa's most populous nation as it approaches the campaign period for elections in 2011 with uncertainty over who is in charge.

The acting president, Goodluck Jonathan, is trying to assert his authority, while the country's leader, Umaru Yar'Adua, remains too ill to govern.

Yar'Adua returned from three months in a Saudi hospital, where he was being treated for a heart condition, a week and a half ago but has still not been seen in public.

Presidency sources say he remains in a mobile intensive care unit.

Jonathan deployed hundreds of troops and police to quell January's unrest, which followed a dispute between Muslim and Christian neighbours over the rebuilding of homes destroyed in 2008.

Community leaders estimated that the death toll from the four days of clashes was more than 400, while police figures put it at 326.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/08/nigeria-religious-violence-jos