The crowd gathering around the rescue workers was strangely silent: old men, women and children queued at a simple wooden table in the Nigerian town of Yelwa, waiting for their bullet wounds and machete gashes to be treated.
Some of the most seriously injured were dragged out in wheelbarrows to meet the Red Cross team, but most stood about in varying degrees of shock and pain, holding out their hacked-up limbs or showing their still weeping entry wounds.
Ethnic violence has become almost a way of life in this remote part of central Nigeria's Plateau State, but the savagery of Sunday's assault -- when a large gang of militants from the Tarok community of Christian farmers swept into the mainly Muslim town -- has stunned even Yelwa's war-weary population.
"This attack is far above our level of thinking. We are under shock. We are not even able to describe what has happened," Adilu Yinuss, a young Yelwa man, told a reporter who visited the town in the aftermath of the attack.
Umar Abdu Mairiga, the head of a Nigerian Red Cross team that managed to get into Yelwa on Thursday, said that most of the wounded need more than just the first aid his small team of nurses could provide, but they were too frightened to travel to hospital in the nearby Christian settlement of Shendam.
After inspecting the huge mass grave behind the house of the town's traditional rulers, he endorsed local claims that more than 600 people were cut down by automatic fire or slashed to death in a night of unfettered violence and destruction.
Less than an hour after the rescuers had entered the town they had already treated 23 seriously injured.
"Most received bullet wounds and machete blows, like this baby here," he said, pointing to a young boy lying cradled in his mother's arms a bearing a 10cm slash across his face.
Once the bleeding stops, the people of Yelwa will have to plan for the future.
They believe the Tarok want them to quit Yelwa for good, and suspect some local officials and security personnel of supporting them. They are thus seeking protection from President Olusegun Obasanjo's federal government.
Mohammed Babayaro is ready to leave. Once one of Yelwa's most prominent businessmen, his house was looted and burned and his family butchered, he said. Two of his four wives and 11 of his 22 children are dead, he claimed.
"If the federal government doesn't make this place safe, I will leave this place with what remains of my family," he said.
Tension was still high in Yelwa four days after the massacre. Visitors had to negotiate a series of police and military checkpoints, the town's Christian minority had disappeared and people kept a fearful eye on the Mobile Police (nickname: "Kill and Go") patrolling the streets.
Some residents accuse the police and army of assisting the attackers -- some of whom were armed with military-issue assault rifles -- and dark rumors are swirling around Yelwa of the kidnap and rape of young women.
Such stories could not immediately be confirmed and, for their part, the police deny any involvement in the atrocities. Officers did, however, admit that the ferocity of the attack had left them powerless to protect the innocent.
"The truth is that the policemen and soldiers were overpowered by the attackers. The various interest groups are better equipped than the security forces," said an officer in the town, playing down the larger casualty estimates. "It is a war situation where propaganda also plays a role."
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