NIGERIA: Nigeria's top Muslim leader said yesterday that 300 people, mostly Muslims, were killed by Christian militia in Sunday's attack on the town of Yelwa.
Justice Abdulkadir Orire, secretary general of the Jama'atu Nasril Islam, described the killings with machine guns in the remote farming town as "genocide" and said they took the death toll from three months of ethnic violence in central Nigeria to at least 700 to 800 people.
"The information we have is that 300 people died and they are mostly Muslims. We call it a genocide because they are killing women and children," Mr Orire said in a telephone interview from his Kaduna headquarters.
The conflict between the Christian Tarok tribe and Muslim Fulani is rooted in competing claims over the fertile farmlands at the heart of Africa's most populous nation.
It is fuelled by religious and ethnic differences.
Mr Orire, a leader of Nigeria's 60 million Muslims, said Tarok militia used machine guns and arson in the attacks which left most of Yelwa's buildings including a mosque destroyed.
He criticised the Plateau state governor Joshua Dariye, a Christian, for apparently inciting violence.
Police stationed in Yelwa had been withdrawn four days before the attack, he said, despite complaints by local Muslims that they were surrounded by Taroks and tension was rising.
"It seems the governor is supporting the move. We heard that the government said non-indigenes should move out of the area," Mr Orire said.
"That is very bad. He should look after everyone in the state and not just his own tribe."
Nigeria is the world's seventh largest oil exporter. Ethnic fighting has hit the OPEC country's oil production in the past, but Yelwa is hundreds of miles from any oilfields.
A journalist in Yelwa on Tuesday saw thousands of Muslims lining the body-strewn streets chanting religious slogans and vowing revenge on the attackers.
These people, many of whom have already fled violence in other parts of the state, are now virtually besieged by Tarok villages surrounding the town.
President Olusegun Obasanjo ordered hundreds of riot police to the area.
State deputy governor Michael Botmang, who visited the town in a heavily armed convoy on Tuesday, told soldiers to shoot troublemakers on sight and imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew.
"The government has ordered security forces to shoot on sight anybody or group found fomenting trouble and the immediate dismantling of all illegal roadblocks mounted by the warriors," Mr Botmang said in a statement from the state capital Jos, adding that the number of casualties had yet to be ascertained.
Analysts say the feud between the Tarok farmers and nomadic Fulani cattle herders has been stoked by irresponsible allocation of land by the government and growing lawlessness across Nigeria.
Tarok believe that the Fulani are settlers in the area, while the Fulani say they have grazed their cattle there periodically for generations. In February, Yelwa witnessed one of the most horrific massacres of the conflict when 48 Christians were killed by Fulani militia in a church that was later burned.