"Nigeria toll rises; army restores calm
Nigerians displaced by religious clashes sought refuge at a displacement center yesterday in the central city of Jos. (Akintunde Akinleye/ Reuters)
JOS, Nigeria - Residents took more bodies to the main mosque in the city of Jos yesterday, 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 in 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 the 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. Jos was calm but tense yesterday. Soldiers patrolled on foot and in jeeps to enforce a 24-hour curfew on the worst-hit neighborhoods. People who ventured out in some areas walked with their hands in the air to show they were unarmed.
--more--"
