PETER CUNLIFFE-JONES, Lagos | Wednesday 10.30am.
TROOPS have been sent to a southern Nigerian town following the death of hundreds of people in unrest between Christians and Muslims and President Olusegun Obasanjo was expected to make an appeal for peace on Wednesday.
Obasanjo was expected to make a broadcast to Africa’s most populous nation — wracked by its worst violence since its return to civilian rule last year — amid reports of a massacre in the town of Aba.
Around 450 people were massacred this week in Aba in reprisals for the killings of hundreds of people in the north last week, a Nigerian reporter said.
“I have never seen anything like it in my life. There were bodies everywhere. We saw, we counted, 292 bodies,” said the Nigerian daily newspaper reporter.
Another reporter said several truckloads of troops were seen driving to the town from Port Harcourt on Tuesday afternoon.
The victims appeared to northern Hausas, who are almost all Muslim, killed by local Ibos from the southeast, who are mostly Christian, in reprisal for the killings of Ibos in the northern city of Kaduna last week, he said.
Hundreds of Hausas had taken refuge in the police station in Aba, said the reporter, contacted in the nearby city of Port Harcourt.
The reports of the massacre came as the government announced that the governors of three northern Nigerian states had agreed to revoke legislation introducing Islamic Sharia law.
Vice President Atiku Abubakar told reporters the decision to withdraw the legislation passed by three states came at an emergency meeting of the country’s 36 state governors presided over by Obasanjo.
“It was decided and agreed that, as far as the Sharia law is concerned, we will return to the status quo ante,” he told reporters after the meeting.
“This has been agreed by the northern governors,” he added.
The introduction of the law and demands for its extension to other states in northern Nigeria had sparked the riots last week in northern Nigeria which set off the latest wave of killings. –AFP