'500 slaughtered' in attacks on Muslim village

Militants from a predominantly Christian tribe killed at least 500 people in attacks on a mainly Muslim village in central Nigeria, a senior Red Cross official said.

Although the exact death toll was not known, Red Cross workers “estimate 500 to 600 dead” after interviewing witnesses and inspecting a mass grave site where hundreds were apparently buried, Red Cross official Umar Abdu Mairiga said yesterday.

He was leading a Nigerian Red Cross team visiting the Hausa-speaking Muslim town of Yelwa, following raids on Sunday and Tuesday by fighters from the largely Christian Tarok tribe.

One hundred people were reported missing following the attacks, many of them women and children allegedly abducted by the attackers, Mairiga added.

“We have done what we could do” to treat 58 injured residents still in the town, he said. At least 100 other wounded civilians were evacuated along with thousands of others whose homes were destroyed, other Red Cross officials said.

Nigerian police – who traditionally downplay casualty tolls in order to try to prevent retaliatory attacks – had initially reported 80 killed, a figure repeated by the Nigerian Red Cross president Emmanuel Ijewere.

On Wednesday, residents showed an Associated Press reporter a 160-square-foot area of freshly upturned soil, behind a mosque in a field smelling of rotting flesh, saying it was the burial site for 280 people killed in the raids by mainly Christian, ethnic Tarok militants.

Yakubu Haruna, a town councillor, estimated the toll would rise to 600 people - many of them buried by family members in fields and scrub forest surrounding the town.

Although just one charred corpse was visible on the main street Thursday, there were “so many dead bodies” interred after the two attacks, Haruna said. ”I cannot say how many."

In a makeshift clinic in front of the home of a local chief, Red Cross officials gave pain-relief injections to men, women and children groaning with pain after being slashed by machetes or shot.

Police escorted truckloads of other residents fleeing the town along a road through neighbouring Shendam, a Christian Tarok community, saying they feared more fighting if they didn’t accompany the groups.

The killings are part of a cycle of back-and-forth attacks along ethnic and religious lines that have rocked Nigeria’s central region since an outburst in September 2001 pitted Christians against Muslims in the once-peaceful city of Jos.

More than 1,000 people died in one week then. Many more have been killed since, including hundreds since January this year.

Few parts of Yelwa, a town of cattle herdsman and semi-nomadic traders, were left untouched in the latest raids by assailants who used jerry cans of kerosene to burn several mosques and hundreds, possibly thousands, of homes and vehicles.

Ambrose Nanlong, a 68-year-old community leader in the nearby town of Shendam - dominated by Tarok-speaking Christians – said some “Christian boys” from Shendam and nearby Kawo took part in the attack on Yelwa to avenge what he said had been a raid by Muslim militants on Kawo earlier in the day.

The Kawo attack could not be independently confirmed and the road to the village was blocked by makeshift barricades of fallen trees.

In February, Muslim militants in Yelwa were blamed for killing nearly 50 people, many of them Christians who took refuge in a church.

“Yelwa has been a thorn in the flesh of Shendam for a very long time,” Nanlong said. He said the Christians took up arms in “self-defence".

Twenty-five young Tarok men with bullet and machete wounds were taken to a hospital in Shendam, the hospital superintendent Samuel Audu said.

Religious, ethnic and political enmities – often intertwined – have fuelled outbreaks of communal bloodshed resulting in more than 10,000 dead since President Olusegun Obasanjo was first elected in 1999, ending 15 years of repressive military rule.