Muslims attacked a Christian village in central Nigeria on Saturday, killing eight people with machetes and burning seven houses and a church in fresh religious violence, a Nigerian army spokesman said.
The attack followed clashes in eastern Nigeria earlier in the week that also killed eight and left six mosques and a church burnt.
“It’s true eight people were killed,” Nigerian Lieutenant Colonel Kingsley Umoh said.
The attack occurred in Mazzah village, near the city of Jos, where deadly religious clashes have occurred a number of times in recent months.
Umoh said Fulani Muslims entered Mazzah between 1:30am and 5am, shooting sporadically in the air to lure sleeping residents outside their homes before they were killed.
“Seven people were killed instantly with machetes while three others were seriously injured. One of them died on the way to the hospital,” Umoh said.
He said troop reinforcements had been deployed to Mazzah, some 14km from Jos, the capital of central Plateau State, to prevent the violence from escalating.
The village was calm on Saturday afternoon, but some residents were seen leaving for Jos out of fears for their safety.
A senior Nigerian official, Gyang Pwajok, described the overnight attack on the mainly Christian village as an “act of terrorism.”
Plateau State lies in the so-called middle belt between the predominantly Muslim north and the mainly Christian south.
Jos has long been the center of ethnic and religious violence in a country whose 150 million population is divided almost equally between Christians and Muslims.
In March, Muslim herdsmen from the Fulani and Hausa ethnic groups launched attacks on five Christian Berom villages near the city, killing more than 500 people, state officials said.
Local rights groups say 1,500 people have died in inter-communal violence in the Jos region since the start of this year alone.
The clashes earlier this week occurred in Wukari, a town in the remote eastern Taraba state, over the building of a mosque.
A Christian mob opposed to the construction of the mosque razed it, police said. Muslims responded by attacking a nearby church, leading to the eruption of violent clashes between the two sides.
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