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/ 18 April 2007

Nigerian army battles Islamic militants

Nigerian troops killed many Islamic militants in a three-hour battle in the northern city of Kano on Wednesday, an army commander said. Troops surrounded the militants in the Panshekara district of the city early on Wednesday after they had burned a police station and killed 13 officers.

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/ 13 April 2007

Muslim cleric killed in Nigerian mosque attack

Gunmen shot dead a radical Muslim cleric in his mosque and fired on the congregation, killing two more people, in the northern Nigerian city of Kano on Friday, witnesses said. Followers of Jaafar Adam, a Wahhabi cleric, said the attack was political, ahead of the weekend elections for governors and legislators for the country’s 36 states.

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/ 10 February 2007

Bird flu resurfaces in northern Nigerian state

Bird flu has reappeared, after an eight-month lull, on poultry farms in a fourth state in northern Nigeria, officials said on Friday. ”In the past one week we culled 5 000 chickens following laboratory confirmation of the existence of the avian flu virus in samples of dead chickens,” said a state agriculture commissioner.

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/ 12 January 2007

Fresh outbreak of bird flu suspected in Nigeria

A suspected fresh outbreak of avian influenza has been reported in northern Nigeria’s Katsina State with more than 5 000 birds infected, the agriculture commissioner said on Friday. ”We have detected an outbreak in three poultry farms in and around the state capital in the past week. We strongly suspect it to be bird flu,” Ali Hussein Dutsin-Ma said.

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/ 11 October 2006

Nigerian court sentences sect leader to death

A high court in northern Nigeria’s Adamawa state on Tuesday sentenced the leader of an unorthodox and militant Islamic sect on the run for 22 years to death by hanging, state-run Radio Nigeria Kaduna reported. Musa Ali Suleiman (51) was found guilty of three charges of murder, conspiracy and incitement of public disturbance.

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/ 2 October 2006

Feared dam-collapse victims found alive in Nigeria

All but one of 40 people feared to have drowned in torrential flooding in northern Nigeria’s Zamfara state have been found alive and well, officials said on Monday. The local residents were declared missing presumed dead after torrential rains caused a dam to burst on Saturday on the outskirts of the state capital Gusau, sweeping away 500 houses.

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/ 17 February 2006

Nigeria’s bird-flu epidemic spreads

Nigerian officials on Friday pressed on with mass poultry culling in the ravaged north to prevent bird flu from claiming human lives amid fears that the virus could have spread to yet another farm. Ali Hussani Dutsin-Ma, the top health official in the northern state of Katsina, said that the deadly H5N1 strain of the virus that can kill humans may have surfaced in a second farm near the state capital.

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/ 11 February 2006

Nigerian bird flu spreads despite clean-up bid

Nigerian officials battled to contain an outbreak of a deadly strain of bird flu on Saturday amid reports that it is spreading rapidly through poultry flocks and approaching the Niger border. Agricultural officials were preparing to quarantine and disinfect two farms where tens of thousands of birds have died on the outskirts of Kano

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/ 7 February 2006

Nigerian state cancels Danish contract

Nigerian state lawmakers burned Danish and Norwegian flags on Tuesday and cancelled a €23-million (-million) contract to import buses in protest at cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed. A rowdy session of the Kano House of Assembly also voted unanimously to ban the sale of all Danish and Norwegian products in the state.

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/ 19 September 2005

Nigerian Islamic court orders amputation

Nigerian Islamic judges have ordered that a teenager from Niger have his hand cut off after he confessed to stealing a motorbike, court officials said on Monday. This is thought to be the first time that a foreign national has been sentenced to amputation since northern Nigeria began to reintroduce sharia in 1999.

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/ 1 June 2005

Drivers protest Islamic ban on women passengers

Moped-taxi drivers in the mainly Muslim northern Nigerian city of Kano carried leafy branches on their bikes on Tuesday in a symbol of protest at an imminent ban on carrying female passengers. Kano’s governor postponed a ceremony at which he was to impose the ban, in line with his administration’s interpretation of Islamic Sharia law.

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/ 11 May 2005

Deaf in Nigeria protest against govt neglect

About 200 deaf people staged a protest on Tuesday in the northern Nigerian city of Kano against what they called government neglect of their plight. Under the banner of their organisation, the Deaf Youth Association, they called for special sign language interpreters for news and other programmes broadcast on state-run television.

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/ 10 December 2004

Nigerian universities close after religious clashes

Nigerian authorities said on Friday they have shuttered two universities after the latest outbreak of Christian-Muslim fighting in restive northern Nigeria, hoping to calm tensions after a student religious debate turned violent. Fighting flared anew on Thursday when a student shared Christian texts downloaded from the internet with Muslim pupils.

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/ 26 August 2004

Young Nigerian transvestite caught out

A teenage Nigerian transvestite and seller of love potions who lived undetected for seven years among the married women of his conservative Islamic community has been caught and now faces jail. Abubakar Hamza said this week that he disguised himself as a girl and ran away from his home in a farming village of Ajingi aged only 12.

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/ 4 August 2004

Nigerian parents still refusing polio vaccine

A renewed drive to immunise Nigerian children living amid the world’s worst outbreak of polio has run into fierce opposition from parents and Islamic teachers. As the five-day campaign approached its end, officials in the northern city of Kano admitted they would not hit its target of vaccinating four million under-fives against the crippling disease.