500 Are Reported Killed in Violence in Nigeria

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

Although an exact toll from the raids Sunday and Tuesday was unavailable, Red Cross workers who interviewed witnesses and families of victims and inspected a mass burial site “estimate 500 to 600 dead,” said Umar Abdu Mairiga, head of the Nigerian Red Cross team visiting the mostly Muslim town of Yelwa after the assaults by the Tarok tribe.

Thousands of people fled the fighting, and at least 158 people were wounded. About 100 people also were missing, many of them women and children allegedly abducted, Mairiga added.

Police, who tend to downplay casualty tolls to stem retaliatory attacks, earlier reported 80 killed, a figure repeated by Nigerian Red Cross President Emmanuel Ijewere.

Religious, ethnic and political enmities -- often intertwined -- have fueled outbreaks of communal bloodshed resulting in more than 10,000 deaths since President Olusegun Obasanjo was elected in 1999, ending 15 years of repressive military rule. Violence in central Nigeria has erupted in cycles since September 2001, when fighting between Christians and Muslims in the once-peaceful city of Jos killed more than 1,000 people. Hundreds more have been killed in fighting since then.

Few parts of Yelwa, a town of cattle herdsman and semi-nomadic traders, were left untouched in the latest raids; attackers with jerry cans of kerosene burned several mosques and hundreds, possibly thousands of homes and vehicles.

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