Many Dead in Nigerian Riots
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Sunday, March 07, 2010
Scores of people have been reported killed in suspected religious clashes near the central Nigerian city of Jos.
Witnesses said corpses were piled up in the village of Dogo-Nahawa, a few kilometres (miles) south of Jos. A doctor at a hospital in Jos told Reuters news agency that victims had been cut by machetes and burnt.
In January hundreds of people were killed in riots in the city, which lies between the mainly Muslim north and the more Christian south.
Ethnic and religious riots also broke out in 2008, killing hundreds. The attack happened before dawn on Sunday morning when gangs of men descended on the village and attacked people with machetes, reports say.
A resident of Dogo-Nahawa said the attackers had fired guns as they entered the village.
"The shooting was just meant to bring people from their houses and then when people came out they started cutting them with machetes," Peter Jang told Reuters.
An unnamed government official told AFP at least 100 people had been killed - most of them women and children.
Another eyewitness told the press he saw scores of dead bodies including those of children.
The military, which already has a presence in Jos, has sent troops to the village.
Analysts say the attack seems to be in reprisal for the clashes between Christians and Muslims in January, which claimed the lives of at least 200 people and displaced thousands of others.
Hundreds of people have fled from Jos in the aftermath of the fighting, the Red Cross says.
A Red Cross official in the nearby state of Bauchi said more than 600 people had fled into makeshift camps there to escape the violence.