Thousands of Christians fled their burning homes in the northern Nigerian city of Kano on Wednesday, as Muslim gangs defied a huge security operation to launch sectarian attacks in reprisal for a massacre earlier this month.
Kano's police chief, Commissioner Abdul Ganiyu Dawodu, told reporters that 30 people had so far been killed and 40 hospitalized in two days of fighting, but Christian families fleeing outlying districts said that many more may have died and not yet been recovered.
"We had no option but to give the order to our men to shoot anybody who tries to disturb the peace, especially when the life of an officer is in danger, or the security of society is threatened," Dawodu said, admitting that a lack of vehicles had prevented his men from controlling the riot in the sprawling northern commercial center.
PHOTO: REUTERS
He did not say how many of the casualties were caused by police fire.
At Kano General Hospital doctors were treating a steady stream of people with machete and gunshot wounds, including four men whose friends said had been shot by police, two of them in the stomach, two in the legs.
Meanwhile, between 5,000 and 10,000 terrified refugees had gathered on a patch of land next to police headquarters seeking sanctuary from the mob.
Fighting first broke out Tuesday, when Muslim youths went on a rampage following a street protest called to denounce a May 2 attack by a Christian ethnic militia on the mainly Muslim market town of Yelwa, in central Nigeria, which left more than 200 dead.
Large numbers of police and troops were deployed late Tuesday to enforce a dusk-to-dawn curfew, and by the next morning they had secured control of the city center and were protecting Kano's main Christian ghetto.
But once the overnight clampdown was lifted, fighting spread to the city's suburbs, witnesses fleeing the scene told reporters.
"Many people have been killed in Sharada, but we have not been able to bring out their bodies, because we had to look [after] our own lives," said 37-year-old foundry worker Joshua Adamu, adding that his home had been burnt down.
Smoke could be seen rising from the outlying districts of Rijiyar Zakim, Sharada and Kofar Kabuga, but soldiers prevented journalists from approaching the scene. Refugees were seen fleeing the area in buses and police jeeps.
On May 2, a gang from the Tarok ethnic group attacked the mainly Muslim market town of Yelwa, in the Shendam local government area of central Nigeria's Plateau State, 300km east of Abuja.
Nigeria's central government estimated the death toll at between 200 and 300, while local officials and witnesses said more than 600 had died. The attack appears to have been a bid to drive Muslims out of the region.
Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo vowed Wednesday to bring an end to the sprialling ethnic and religious violence in Plateau State.
"We cannot have a situation where a part of the country has become a sore, a source of instability and insecurity," he said in the capital Abuja while receiving a report from a committee he formed last month on the situation in the state, a statement said.
Obasanjo held a crisis meeting with influential Muslim scholars in Abuja, calling on them to rein in the anger of their supporters.
Tuesday's protest in Kano, 400km north of Abuja, was called in solidarity with the Yelwa Muslims. Despite appeals for calm, rioting broke out shortly afterwards, amid signs that the anger is spreading to other parts of Nigeria's Muslim north, a swathe of bush and semi-desert on the southern edge of the Sahara, inhabited by more than 40 million people.
Mu'azu Ahardawu, a radio reporter in the northern city of Bauchi, told reporters that a security operation had been launched after leaflets were found calling on Muslims to avenge the Yelwa killings and on Christians to leave the region.
Nigeria is Africa's most populous country, and its 130 million-strong population is divided evenly between Christians and Muslims. More than 10,000 people have died in mob violence since the end of military rule in 1999.
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