Nigeria’s Clashes Death Toll Ups To 300 – Report

The Canadian national broadcaster quoted the government as saying that the mostly Christian Tarok militia destroyed most of the buildings in Yelwa, including a mosque.

The clashes were triggered after Christian farmers and Muslim cattle herders were fighting mainly over fertile farmland in the area.

Police, soldiers and relatives were working to recover more bodies in Yelwa, as a curfew has been imposed in the town.

The security forces have been ordered to fire at trouble-makers on sight.

A Reuters correspondent in the town said that mutilated and charred corpses were still lying on the main street of the remote market town on Tuesday.

Almost every house lining the main street of Yelwa was burned and some were still smoldering, said the correspondent, adding a mosque was also destroyed.

"People are still burying their dead," said Plateau State police commander Innocent Iluozoke after returning from the scene.

"The situation is under control. The combined military and mobile policemen dispatched to the area early yesterday have quelled the violence," Plateau State Information Commissioner Dauda Lamba told Agence France-Presse (AFP) from Jos.

Missing

Villagers who fled Yelwa told local reporters that the final death toll could be in the hundreds, with a mass grave being dug after militiamen sprayed the village with heavy-caliber fire from machine guns mounted on jeeps.

Lamba was cautious, saying: "We are still collating the casualty figures. But I can confirm the figure given by the state commissioner of police who put the death toll at 67. I know dozens of other people may be missing".

"I am talking of those who fled because of the fighting. But I am sure many of them will return when the situation is normal. I don’t want to risk the temptation of considering those still missing as dead," he explained.

Tension

The situation could further deteriorate, as the simmering tension is still there.

Thousands of Muslims lined the roadside chanting religious slogans vowing retaliation, the BBC News Online reported Wednesday.

Hundreds of youths in Christian villages near Yelwa were sitting on the roadside, seemingly awaiting further violence.

Justice Orire, secretary general of the Nigerian Muslim umbrella organization Jama’atu Nasril Islam, asked from where the Christian militia had got machine guns, if they had not had outside backing.

Muslims from Yelwa reported that their cattle were being taken, or prevented from grazing, and they felt there was an attempt to get them to leave the area, even before this week’s events, the BBC News Online quoted Orire as saying.

Ethnic and sectarian clashes are commonplace in central Nigeria, particularly in Plateau State where fighting often pits various ethnic groups against one another in a battle for fertile land.

The Tarok are mainly Christian and are subsistence farmers, while their Hausa and Fulani rivals are often nomadic herdsmen, whose livestock threaten their neighbors’ crops.

Nigerian security forces attempt to keep order in the area, but have proved incapable of enforcing a lasting peace.

There have been several recent reports of large-scale massacres in Plateau and neighboring Taraba, but accurate casualty tolls are hard to obtain in a remote and permanently unsafe area of the country.