Thousands shelter in barracks after Nigeria unrest
MAIDUGURI, Nigeria (Reuters) - Thousands of Nigerians sheltered in barracks in the northern city of Maiduguri on Tuesday after days of clashes involving Muslim rebels which have killed at least 150 people across four states.
Members of a local Islamic group have burnt churches, police stations and a prison and set off petrol bombs near residential areas in the unrest. Local police said 103 people, most of them rioters, had been killed in Maiduguri alone.
The rioters are supporters of a radical Islamic preacher opposed to Western education, who critics say has whipped some students and illiterate, jobless youths into an anti-establishment frenzy over a period of years.
The latest unrest was triggered when some members of the group called Boko Haram, which wants a wider adoption of Islamic sharia law across Africa's most populous nation, were arrested in Bauchi state. Violence then spread to the states of Kano, Yobe and Borno, of which Maiduguri is the capital.
"When we heard shooting and saw people running we just packed the family and joined them," said Sunny Nwankwo, a journalist who fled to one of two barracks in Maiduguri sheltering thousands of civilians.
Residents said youths armed with machetes, knives, bows and arrows, locally made hunting rifles and home-made explosives had attacked police buildings and anyone resembling a police officer or government official, causing hundreds of families to flee.
Streets around Maiduguri's main market and some residential areas in the Lamisula neighbourhood were deserted.
Isa Azare, spokesman for Maiduguri police command, said 90 of the rioters as well as eight police officers, three prison officials and two soldiers had been killed.
"I saw more than five big police trucks loaded with bodies ... but from the look of things the police and the military are in control of the situation because since this morning there has been relative calm," Maiduguri resident Gana Marari said.
More than 50 people were killed in Sunday's violence in Bauchi and several have been reported killed in Kano and Yobe.
Armed police manned roadblocks and patrolled Kano's streets on Tuesday but the city was calm. Soldiers and police enforced a night time curfew in Bauchi but there was no fresh unrest.
JOBLESS YOUTHS
The four northern states are among the 12 of Nigeria's 36 states that started a stricter enforcement of sharia in 2000 -- a decision that has alienated sizeable Christian minorities and sparked bouts of sectarian violence that killed thousands.
Maiduguri is the home of Mohammed Yusuf, the leader of Boko Haram -- which means "educated is prohibited" -- and the city appears to have borne the brunt of the unrest.
Locals say Yusuf's followers are largely illiterate youths and jobless students who have quit their university education in support of his anti-establishment preachings, but they say his views are rejected by most of the city's Muslim leaders.
"We do not believe in Western education. It corrupts our ideas and beliefs. That is why we are standing up to defend our religion," a senior member of the group, Abdulmuni Ibrahim Mohammed, told Reuters on Monday after his arrest in Kano state.
More than 200 ethnic groups generally live peacefully side by side in Nigeria, a country of around 140 million people, although civil war left one million dead between 1967 and 1970 and there have been bouts of religious unrest since then.
Radical Islamists -- dubbed the Nigerian Taliban after militants in Afghanistan -- launched a brief spate of attacks in late 2003 on police stations and government offices in the northeast, prompting a fierce security crackdown.
Security forces killed 25 suspected Islamic militants in an all-day battle on the outskirts of Kano in April 2007, days before a presidential election.
The State Security Services (SSS) arrested a group of Islamists with suspected links to al Qaeda around six months later and some Western diplomats have expressed concerns that Nigeria could become a target for radical Islamic groups.
But no conclusive evidence of al Qaeda's presence in Nigeria or of links to the Taliban in Afghanistan have been made public.
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(Additional reporting by Mike Oboh in Kano, Ardo Hazzad in Bauchi and Felix Onuah in Abuja; Writing by Nick Tattersall; Editing by Giles Elgood)