Mobs of machete-wielding young men killed at least seven people and set fire to cars, stores and apartment buildings Tuesday after a march to protest the killings of hundreds of Muslims by gunmen from a predominantly Christian group last week.
Businesses closed and school children hurried home in the heavily Muslim northern city of Kano after thousands of protesters marched from the city's main mosque to protest the attacks on Hausa-speaking Muslims by fighters from the Tarok-speaking tribe in the central Nigerian town of Yelwa.
Seven bodies -- some charred and another badly mutilated -- lay on streets of Kano, although it was unclear who killed them. There were unconfirmed reports of several others killed by young men who barricaded streets with piles of burning tires and garbage.
Amina Usman, a 19-year-old university student, recounted seeing two mutilated bodies next to a makeshift checkpoint where young Muslim Hausa-speaking men holding sticks, knives and clubs were searching cars for Christian and animists and asking passengers to recite Muslim prayers.
"It was hell," said Mohammed Aliyu, another university student, who said he saw five bodies in another part of Kano, Nigeria's largest Muslim city, one of them with a burning tire around its neck.
Sule Ya'u Sule, a state government spokesman, announced a dusk-to-dawn curfew and blamed the rioting on "disgruntled elements" he did not identify. He stressed the earlier march had been peaceful.
A Red Cross official has said between 500 and 600 people died in the Yelwa attacks, while the Nigerian government's emergency response agency estimated less than half that number.
In the capital Abuja, President Olusegun Obasanjo met Tuesday with a delegation of Muslim leaders calling for the capture of the Yelwa attackers.
Obasanjo asked them to "tell your followers to be patient and give me time to resolve the matter."
"It's time now to put a permanent stop to this whole thing," Obasanjo said as reporters looked on. "The situation in Yelwa is condemnable and I condemn it in very strong terms."
In Kano, soldiers and police rushed into streets in armored vehicles in an attempt to quell what began as an angry demonstration but turned quickly into a riot.
"Everywhere, people have taken the laws into their own hands. We are trying to control the situation," Kano police commissioner Abdul Damini Daudu said.
An AP reporter saw youths at a makeshift checkpoint of burning tires strike three young women with machetes after accusing them of being "nonbelievers" for wearing Western-style skirts and blouses.
The women escaped with bleeding head wounds after several motorcycle taxi drivers intervened.
Muslim leaders in Kano, a hotbed of past violence, linked the Yelwa attacks to the US-led war against terror.
"This violence is a calculated global Western war against Muslims, just like in Afghanistan and Iraq," Umar Ibrahim Kabo, the most senior cleric in Kano, told protesters. "Muslims are in grief."
Ibrahim Shekarau, the governor of Kano, told protesters gathering outside his office that "killings of Muslims throughout the world ... will only embolden us."
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