LAGOS

Islamic sharia law is making inroads into the predominantly Christian south of Nigeria at a time when religion is expected to be a crucial issue in looming general elections.

A Nigerian university has expelled 432 students for allegedly impersonating or using forged documents to gain admission, a university official said on Thursday.

Rescue workers on Monday pulled four more bodies from the wreckage of a massive weekend explosion that shook Nigeria’s biggest city, as the death toll climbed to 44, and authorities ruled out terrorism as the cause of the blast.

Ethnic clashes flared for the third day in Nigeria’s southern oil town of Warri on Sunday, with rival gangs burning houses in a blaze that set the night sky glowing orange, residents said.

The northern Nigerian city of Kaduna was peaceful overnight, officials and residents said on Monday, as riots fuelled by opposition to the Miss World pageant came to an end.

The body of Nigerian minority rights activist and writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, executed seven years ago to worldwide outrage, has been exhumed for a ”decent” reburial, his family said on Wednesday.

Corrupt leaders have looted some -billion from Africa in the last three or four decades, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo said, citing this as the main reason for poverty in Africa.

Nigeria, host of this year’s Miss World pageant, has warned beauty queens competing in the contest to avoid parts of the country where Shariah law is enforced.

Nigeria’s massive voter registration process ended in disarray on Sunday in Lagos and many other parts of the country where a one-day extension failed to be implemented.

CORRUPTION allegations have this month tarnished the image of Nigeria’s press, triggering self-doubt at the start of an election race in which it will play a major role.

Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka has blamed what he called a ”dictatorship of first comers” for looming uncertainty in the country’s emerging democracy, newspapers reported on Sunday.

About 100 villagers took control of one of ChevronTexaco’s offshore facilities as protests against oil companies spread in southwestern Nigeria.

At least 37 people died and 11 more are in critical condition following a fire in a Nigerian rubber goods factory, the Nigerian Red Cross said on Wednesday.

The main military barracks in Nigeria’s commercial capital, Lagos, is still unsafe six months after a disaster that claimed hundreds of lives.

Nigeria’s uncompromising brand of zero-tolerance policing, dubbed ”Operation Fire for Fire”, came under attack after two innocent students were shot dead.

Hundreds of thousands of prison inmates and sick people in hospitals may be disenfranchised as there is no provision to register them when a review of the voters’ roll begins next week.

Nigerians will mark their 42nd year of independence on Tuesday in a grim and fearful mood, as Africa’s most populous nation stumbles on from one political crisis to the next.

Nigeria’s election commission has registered three new parties out of a total of 24 that applied to compete in next year’s national elections.

A Nigerian rights panel has linked former military ruler General Ibrahim Babangida and two of his security chiefs to the murder of a journalist 16 years ago.

A pregnant Nigerian woman and her former lover serving jail terms for adultery have not been told that they have been sentenced to death by stoning, their lawyer said on Monday.

Harsh sentences imposed by Islamic courts in northern Nigeria since a dozen states adopted the Shariah legal code have drawn consistently strong criticism from President Olusegun Obasanjo’s federal government.