Nigerian troops were patrolling villages near the northern city of Jos yesterday after the massacreon Sunday of more than 500 Christians there that sparked international shock and outrage.
Survivors of the latest wave of inter-ethnic violence, in which women and children were hacked to death or burned alive in their homes, however, denounced the authorities for failing to intervene in time.
Relatives of the dead attended funerals on Monday for the victims of the three-hour orgy of violence in three Christian villages close to the northern city of Jos.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Witnesses have blamed the massacre on members of the mainly Muslim Fulani ethnic group and according to media reports Muslim villagers were warned two days before the attack via text messages to their phones.
The security forces said they had detained 95 suspects over the violence.
“We have over 500 killed in three villages and the survivors are busy burying their dead,” State Information Commissioner Gregory Yenlong said.
“People were attacked with axes, daggers and cutlasses — many of them children, the aged and pregnant women,” he said.
About 200 people were being treated in hospital, the information ministry said.
But the Plateau State Christian Elders Consultative Forum complained that it had taken the army two hours to react after receiving a distress call.
By that time, “the attackers had finished their job and left,” they said.
Acting President Goodluck Jonathan has already sacked his chief security advisor.
The explosion of violence was just the latest between rival ethnic and religious groups.
In January, 326 people died in clashes in and around Jos, police said, although rights activists put the overall toll at more than 550.
John Onaiyekan, the archbishop of the capital, Abuja, told Vatican Radio that the violence was rooted not in religion, but in social, economic and tribal differences.
“It is a classic conflict between pastoralists and farmers, except that all the Fulani are Muslims and all the Berom are Christians,” he said.
Fulani are mainly nomadic cattle rearers, while Beroms are traditionally farmers.
Locals said Sunday’s attacks were the result of a feud which had been first ignited by a theft of cattle and then fuelled by deadly reprisals.
Rights activists also said the slaughter appeared to be revenge for the January attacks, in which mainly Muslims were killed.
On Monday, Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi expressed the Roman Catholic Church’s “sadness” at the “horrible acts of violence.”
Much of the violence was centered around the village of Dogo Nahawa, where gangs set fire to straw-thatched mud huts as they went on their rampage.
Witnesses said armed gangs had scared people out of their homes by firing into the air but most of the killings were the result of machete attacks.
“We were caught unawares … and as we tried to escape, the Fulani who were already waiting slaughtered many of us,” said Dayop Gyang, of Dogo Nahawa.
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