JOEL OLATUNDE AGOI, Lagos | Monday
THE death toll from three days of clashes between gangs in a district of the Nigerian city of Lagos rose Monday to 55, Red Cross Chairman Emmanuel Ijewere told a local radio station.
An AFP reporter saw six bodies being brought into the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (Luth), and hospital workers said that at least 15 bodies had been brought in earlier, though other witnesses put the toll from the fighting in the city’s Mushin district still higher.
The final figure was expected to rise.
Lagos State Police Commissioner Mike Okiro said late on Sunday the fighting had been brought under control and arrests had been made.
“We have controlled it. The situation is now calm. We have made some arrests,” he said.
More than 20 homes and two dozens stalls and shops had been burned, with the worst affected area being the St John Street thoroughfare, in the Mushin district, close to the Luth, one of the largest and best hospitals in Lagos.
A fire engine sent to put out the blaze was stopped by a gang of gleeful unruly youths and driven off, the distraught fire crew said.
The fighting erupted on Saturday between gang members of the ethnic Yoruba and Hausa communities in the district. Skirmishes that had died down overnight flared again early on Sunday.
Volunteers of the Nigerian Red Cross were present, going from door to door seeking to bring the injured to hospital. Red Cross representative Patrick Bawa said scores of people had been injured in the clashes but declined to comment on the number of dead.
Beatrice Ugorji, a market trader of the Igbo ethnic community, said she and her family had been caught up in the violence.
“Our house has been burned. The Hausas kept coming back to say we should leave or we will be killed, so we have left and come here,” she said, sitting in the hospital grounds with her husband and three children.
Ganiyu Arahsi, a 54-year-old Yoruba former civil servant, said his house had been burned down and his brother was killed at around 10:00 pm. on Saturday.
He also rents out another house in the area and said two of his tenants were among the injured.
The clashes broke out around midday on Saturday when a young Christian ethnic Yoruba boy was caught defecating near a mosque.
The local Muslim Hausa trader community, which worships at the mosque, was enraged, and a clash erupted between the Hausas and a violent Yoruba militant group, the Odua People’s Congress (OPC).
Much of the city was still reeling from the shock of last week’s catastrophic explosion of a munitions store and a stampede which followed leaving more than 1 000 dead and thousands homeless.
That event has left nerves strained around Lagos, a city of between 10-million and 13 million-people, with residents of one area fleeing a fire Friday near another military cantonment for fear of a repeat explosion.
The munitions store blast and the high death toll have drawn fresh international attention to the fragile situation in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous and arguably most volatile country.
Since it returned to civilian rule in 1999, more than 10 000 people have been killed in ethnic violence in the country and more than 500 000 people have been displaced.
On the Nigerian scale, the weekend unrest in Lagos appeared relatively minor.
In October 1999 and November 2000 the OPC was involved in clashes with the Hausa community in the city which left hundreds dead on each occasion. – AFP