'1000 dead’ in riots

Press, 6 March 1984, Page 10

'1000 dead’ in riots

NZPA-AP London Up to 1000 people have been killed during week-old religious violence in northeastern Nigeria, the 8.8. C. reports. The streets of the city of Yola were littered with bodies, it said.

- Scores of suspected followers of the outlawed Maitatsine Muslim sect blamed for the fighting that erupted last week in Gongola state had been lynched by mobs in Yola, the state capital, the 8.8. C. said.

Quoting the Governmentowned “New Nigerian” newspaper, the 8.8. C. said that many people had been killed in the cross-fire between members of the fundamentalist sect and troops sent by Nigeria’s military regime to restore order.

The 8.8.C.’s World Ser-

vice said that authorities in Yola had removed some 500 bodies yesterday from the streets of the capital, 800 km north-east of Lagos. It said that doctors in Yola had reported they had counted 250 dead in hospitals alone. The “New Nigerian” asserted that the fundamentalists were using “sophisticated weapons” against troops and the police. It gave no other details. But Army officers reported in Lagos on Friday that “pockets of resistance” by fundamentalists were holding out against Government forces.

The radio quoted the “New Nigerian” correspondent in Yola as reporting that food was running short in the city and that commerce had halted.

Hundreds of people were reported to have fled the

city to nearby police and Army barracks.

The acting state governor, Lieutenant-Colonel Cyril Iweze, said on Thursday in the last official report on the violence that at least 137 people had been killed and 50 wounded and that more than 700 people had been arrested.

The Lagos “Daily Times” said that the detainees included the alleged leader of the riots, Musa Makaliki. Violence was also reported in the nearby town of Jimeta, near the Cameroon border. The trouble flared on Monday last week when followers of a self-proclaimed prophet, Alhaji Marwa Maitatsine, took to the streets armed with guns, axes and machetes.

Alhaji Maitatsine was killed in 1980 with nearly

4200 other people in religious rioting in Kano, centre of the Islamic faith in Nigeria, that was crushed by the Army and Air Force. His sect, outlawed after the 1980 bloodshed, rejects the authority of the prophet Muhammad and spurns modern customs.

Many of Alhaji Maitatsine’s followers dust themselves with “magic powder” that they believe makes them invulnerable to gun fire.

Since Nigeria gained its independence from Britain in 1960 there have been repeated religious clashes in Africa’s most populous nation. Muslims account for about half the estimated 100 million people, 35 per cent are Christian, and the rest adhere to a variety of religions. .