Fourteen people have been trampled to death and scores injured in a stampede at an all-night prayer meeting in southeast Nigeria, according to police.
The stampede on Thursday at a prayer meeting of the Catholic Church in Enugu city, started after an armed gang invaded the venue, Nigerian newspapers reported today.
The independent Vanguardnewspaper quoted the diocese's director of communications Rev Fr Evans Offor as saying that the victims were trying to escape hired assassins who stormed the venue.
"These people looked like thugs, hired assassins; when they began to harass people at the gate, people became so much afraid and there was pandemonium," Fr Offor said, according to the paper.
The prayer meetings, conducted every Wednesday night by the fiery priest Ejike Mbaka, are regularly attended by tens of thousands of people hoping to be saved from poverty and disease.
Police said they are looking for the charismatic priest, a long standing critic of the state government.
The deaths, the latest in a cycle of political violence in Nigeria in the runup to crucial general elections next year, has heightened political tension in the region.
In January, at least 1000 people were killed in a stampede triggered by massive armoury explosions at a military barracks in Nigeria's biggest city and commercial capital, Lagos.
Dozens of people were crushed to death in the past during crusades in some Nigerian cities by fiery German Christian preacher Reinhard Bonnke, who professed to cure HIV/AIDS and perform other miracles.