Hundreds dead as Christians target Muslims

Published on Saturday 23 January 2010 19:45

BODIES were yesterday being pulled from wells and cesspits in a Nigerian village riven by four days of rioting between Christians and Muslims.

As many as 400 people may have died in and around the town of Jos last week before Nigerian authorities deployed the military to contain violence, some reports suggested last night. Official sources, however, offered smaller numbers.

The New York-based Human Rights Watch yesterday said it believed Muslims in Jos and neighbouring villages had been targeted for a deliberate massacre.

Muhammad Tanko Shittu, a senior mosque official organising mass burials in Jos, said more than 200 bodies had been found in a nearby village called Kuru Karama.

He said: "So many bodies were dumped into wells and were littered around, others were being evacuated by the federal authorities," he said.

Both Shittu and Red Cross officials said they were still counting bodies and could not yet give an exact toll.

Human Rights Watch said groups of armed men attacked the mostly Muslim population of Kuru Karama on Tuesday, burning some alive and killing others as they tried to flee. It urged Jonathan to order an investigation of "credible reports of a massacre of at least 150 Muslim residents".

"They were armed with cutlasses, guns, sticks and bags of stone. It was not the Christians from our community but those from outside who came," one 32-year-old resident of Kuru Karama, who was not named, told Human Rights Watch.

"The children were running helter-skelter. The men were trying to protect the women. People who ran into the bush were killed. Some were burnt in the mosque and some went to the houses and were burnt," he said.

He said he had seen the bodies of 20-30 children, some burnt, some sliced with machetes, and that his wife was in hospital with an 11-month-old girl who had been cut with an axe.

"I came back on Wednesday evening escorted by the military. I saw dead bodies everywhere," he said.

The unrest around the capital of Plateau state, which lies at the crossroads of Nigeria's Muslim north and predominantly Christian south, underscores the fragility of Africa's most populous nation as it approaches the campaign period for 2011 elections with uncertainty over who is in charge.

President Umaru Yar'Adua has been receiving medical treatment in Saudi Arabia for two months and has not formally handed executive powers to his vice-president, triggering court challenges over the legality of government decisions.

The Red Cross has estimated 17,000 people were displaced and took shelter in colleges, hospitals and schools.