Scores of women and children were today hacked to death by raiders wielding machetes in a fresh bout of religious violence in Nigeria. Dozens of corpses were reportedly piled up in streets near the central city of Jos after pre-dawn clashes between Islamist pastoralists and Christian villagers. One report put the death toll at more than 200.
Some apparently burned to death and many others were displaced as homes were razed to the ground. Local aid agencies described it as a "reprisal" attack for sectarian violence in January that left more than 300 dead, most of them Muslims, and saw Jos put under a military curfew.
Residents in Dogo Nahawa, a mostly Christian village about three miles south of Jos, said Islamist pastoralists from the surrounding hills attacked at about 3am, shooting into the air before slashing villagers with machetes as they came out of their homes.
A villager, Peter Jang, said: "They came around three o'clock in the morning and started shooting into the air. 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 counted more than 200 bodies, mainly women and children, killed by blows from machetes.
Kosoko said he made the count yesterday afternoon with an official from the state government. Military units began surrounding the affected villages around the same time.
"This is an act of inhumanity," said Da Buba Gyang, the traditional ruler of the Christian Berom ethnic group in Jos.
A Reuters witness who visited the village counted around 100 bodies. Pam Dantong, medical director of Plateau state hospital in Jos, showed reporters 18 corpses that had been brought from the village, some of them charred. 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 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."
He added: "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 into makeshift camps there to escape the violence.
Sectarian violence in this region of Nigeria has left thousands dead 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 killed at least 700 people.
The instability underscores 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 sick 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, after an argument between Muslim and Christian neighbours over the rebuilding of homes destroyed in 2008. Community leaders estimated the death toll from the four days of clashes at more than 400, while police figures put it at 326.
