NIGERIA: The death toll rose to 175 in Nigerian riots sparked by controversy over the Miss World pageant, whose contestants flew to Britain yesterday after organisers moved the event.
Human rights workers said the Muslim-Christian clashes had continued in the northern city of Kaduna yesterday morning, but the situation was generally calm by late afternoon. They said soldiers and police had been arrested on suspicion of taking sides in the blood-letting.
The rioting in mainly Muslim Kaduna began on Wednesday as a protest against a newspaper article which said the Prophet Muhammad would probably have married one of the Miss World contestants were he alive today.
The allegations of killings by security forces could, if confirmed, dramatically raise the stakes in the fighting in Kaduna, where Nigeria's worst explosion of sectarian violence killed some 3,000 people two years ago.
As the relieved beauty contestants arrived in London aboard a chartered flight from Abuja, Nigeria faced the prospect of serious economic and political damage from the fiasco surrounding the event.
The government had thrown its weight behind the pageant, hoping to show Nigeria in a good light and boost tourism in a country almost totally dependent on oil exports for its foreign earnings.
Even before the riots the contest had proved controversial, some participants threatening to boycott it if a woman sentenced to death under Muslim Sharia law for bearing a child outside marriage was not reprieved.
The Nigerian Red Cross yesterday raised the death toll in Kaduna to 175 from 105.
Soldiers fired in the air, warning people off the streets as residents rushed home on foot and in crowded buses ahead of a curfew.
Human rights workers said they had recorded credible accounts of extra-judicial executions by security forces.
According to an account recorded by the Kaduna-based Civil Rights Congress, 15 people in one district were taken from their homes by security forces and shot near the Kaduna river.
"For a particular ward we have 15 names of people reported to have been taken from their homes by soldiers and shot by the river," the group's president, Mr Shehu Sani, said. "From our records, 70 per cent of people killed have died of bullet wounds. This is unusual because the rioters are armed mainly with machetes, knives and clubs, not firearms," he said.
About 12,000 people have been made homeless and between 1,100 and 1,200 have been injured and are in hospital, he said. The newspaper which ran the article that sparked the riots, said the editor of its Saturday paper was in secret police custody.