Muslim-Christian Carnage in Nigeria
World | Sun, Nov 30, 2008 at 9:22:38 am PST
Following a disputed local election in Jos, Nigeria, fighting between Christian and Muslim gangs has left at least 400 people dead.
JOS, Nigeria (Reuters) – Residents took more bodies to the main mosque in the Nigerian city of Jos on Sunday, bringing the death toll from two days of clashes between Muslim and Christian gangs to about 400 people.
Rival ethnic and religious gangs have burned homes, shops, mosques and churches in fighting triggered by a disputed local election in the city at the crossroads of Nigeria’s Muslim north and Christian south. It is the country’s worst unrest for years.
Murtala Sani Hashim, who has been registering the dead as they are brought to the mosque, told Reuters he had listed 367 bodies. Ten corpses wrapped in blankets, two of them infants, lay behind him awaiting burial rites.
A doctor at one of main city hospitals said he had received 25 corpses and 154 injured since the unrest began. “Gunshot wounds, machete injuries, those are the two main types,” Dr Aboi Madaki of the Jos University Teaching Hospital told Reuters.
