Members of Sudan’s government and the two rebel movements fighting in the war-torn Darfur region began substantive peace talks on Monday as the African Union called for an end to a recent upsurge in violence. ”We cannot understand the repeated acts of banditry in Darfur,” AU conference chairperson Salim Ahmed Salim said.
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/ 29 September 2005
Nigeria’s Anglican archbishop said on Thursday that Nigerian churches might cut ties with the Church of England if it did not revise its stance on homosexuality, which accepts gay priests in same-sex partnerships. ”As of now, we have not yet reached the point of schism, but there’s a broken relationship,” Archbishop Peter Akinola told reporters in the capital, Abuja.
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/ 29 September 2005
The prosecution of two Nigerian men who face the death penalty after being accused of sodomy suffered a setback on Thursday when a second police witness said that he had not actually seen the pair having sex. Police Constable Garba Umar was the second officer to admit that he had not witnessed the alleged act.
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/ 24 September 2005
Robbers shot dead a Nigerian policeman in a raid on a United States-owned oil services company in the restive southern city of Port Harcourt on Friday, police said. Gunmen attacked police guarding the Willbros depot in Choba on the outskirts of the city and killed one officer, said Rivers State police commissioner Samuel Adetuyi.
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/ 23 September 2005
Nigerian separatist militants issued what they described as a final warning to international oil giants on Friday demanding they evacuate installations in the Niger Delta within two days or face armed attack. ”We will kill every iota of oil operations in the Niger Delta,” said the statement from the Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force.
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/ 22 September 2005
Nigerian militia fighters have seized and shut down a Chevron oil flow station, a militia leader said. The militia has threatened to shut down oil operations in the southern Niger delta — where most of Opec member Nigeria’s crude is produced — unless its leader, Moujahid Dokubo-Asari, is released from detention.
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/ 21 September 2005
Nigerian separatist militants warned foreign workers to flee the Niger Delta on Wednesday as they threatened to retaliate for the arrest of their leader by attacking oil wells and pipelines. The leader of the banned Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force, Alhaji Mujahid Dokubo Asari, was ”invited for questioning” in Abuja on Tuesday.
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/ 20 September 2005
Nigeria’s Anglican church has deleted all references to its mother church from its constitution, deepening a rift over homosexuality but stopping short of a feared schism. A statement on the church’s website on Tuesday said ”all former references to ‘communion with the see of Canterbury’ were deleted” at a meeting last week.
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/ 19 September 2005
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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/ 15 September 2005
African Union officials were to launch a final round of peace talks in the Nigerian capital Abuja on Thursday to bring an end to slaughter and starvation in the war-torn western Sudanese region of Darfur. AU mediator Sam Ibok told Agence France Presse that the opening ceremony would be held at around 6pm (5pm GMT) but could not confirm whether all the delegates had arrived.
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/ 14 September 2005
More than 20 000 Nigerians marched through their bustling economic capital, Lagos, on Wednesday in a noisy but trouble-free protest against rising fuel prices and President Olusegun Obasanjo’s increasingly unpopular economic policies. Nobel literature laureate Wole Soyinka was among well-known figures leading the march.
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/ 12 September 2005
Nigeria’s police will withdraw their entire contingent of 120 officers serving on a United Nations peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo over sexual-harassment allegations. ”We are withdrawing the entire contingent because when one is contaminated, the whole bunch is contaminated,” a police spokesperson said.
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/ 6 September 2005
Nigerian trade unions and activists said on Monday they will hold a series of rallies to protest against a steep rise in fuel prices, but will not call a nationwide strike as they had earlier threatened. Nigeria has ordered price hikes of up to 40% on fuels such as gas and diesel.
Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo on Tuesday expressed his satisfaction over the release of more than 400 Moroccans by the Algerian-backed Polisario Front after more than 25 years of detention. Morocco annexed the Western Sahara in 1975 but its claim was contested by the Polisario Front, sparking a conflict in the northwestern African region.
Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo on Monday met a group of white farmers whose farms were seized by the Zimbabwean government and promised to help them overcome their initial financial and infrastructural problems in their new country. Obasanjo visited the farmers on their leased land on Friday.
The Anglo-Dutch energy giant Shell resumed production at an oilfield in southern Nigeria that was shut down last week because of a community protest over a spill that polluted local farmland, a Shell spokesperson said on Monday. The announcement will come as a small relief to nervous oil markets monitoring unrest in Iraq and Ecuador and watching prices hovering close to record levels.
Up to 90 people are missing and presumed drowned after a Nigerian river ferry sank in floodwaters near where a bridge was washed away last week, officials and witnesses said on Tuesday. The overcrowded boat capsized on Monday as it carried traders across the Lamurde river near Jalingo, the capital of Taraba state.
Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo has lauded the production of the first anti-retroviral drugs used to battle Aids to be produced by an indigenous firm in the country, his office said on Monday. Obasanjo said during the presentation of the Aids drug by a local drug firm that he is encouraged by the achievement of the company.
At least 10 people have drowned and more are missing after weekend flooding that destroyed a bridge and a residential area of the town of Jalingo in north-eastern Nigeria, a government official said on Monday. Nigerian press reports said that as many as 50 people may have drowned.
A Nigerian Islamic court granted bail on Wednesday to two alleged homosexuals who face the death penalty and whose case has once more drawn international attention to their country’s rights record. The pair were arrested by police in June after witnesses alleged that they had been having sex in a public toilet.
Rescue workers have pulled more bodies from the wreckage of a five-storey building that collapsed on Monday as a construction team was sleeping inside, and the death toll is now at eight, a Red Cross official said on Wednesday. More corpses may still be lying in the debris, said Chika Onah.
Nigerian police say they have scored results in a crackdown launched by President Olusegun Obasanjo’s government in the past three years on internet and e-mail fraud — which has grown to the point that it is associated with Nigeria all over the world. But new scammers are evolving fresh ruses to trap victims and evade detection.
A heavily-laden cargo jet arriving in heavy rain from Dubai overshot the tarmac at Lagos airport on Wednesday in the latest in a series of accidents to shake confidence in Nigeria’s aviation industry. No-one was reported hurt in the drama but many flights were delayed as ground crews worked to unload the plane and drag it away from the runway.
Two Nigerian men appeared in court on Wednesday charged with committing sodomy and could now face being stoned to death after they were caught together in a toilet in this northern Muslim city. A senior United Nations envoy has called on Nigeria to drop homosexuality from the list of crimes punishable by death under sharia law.
An Air France jet ran into a stray cow as it landed in the southern Nigerian oil city of Port Harcourt on Wednesday, airport and airline officials said, adding that no one was injured in the incident. The Airbus A330 passenger liner was arriving overnight from Paris when it drove into a herd that had somehow strayed on to the tarmac.
Hundreds of youths, many with faces daubed in war paint, run through the Kaiama village in Nigeria’s oil-rich delta, rallying to commemorate the death of a secessionist leader killed in the 1960s whom they see as a hero for today. Few had dared advocate the breakup of Nigeria since 1970, when the three-year Biafran civil war ended after causing over one million deaths.
The African Union (AU) was on Monday pushing for progress to be made in ongoing talks to bring peace to western Sudan’s Darfur region as tension eased over Chad’s co-mediation role, an AU spokesperson said. The civil war in Darfur has drawn global attention to what has become one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
Ethiopia’s crackdown on opposition members and students has spread outside the capital, while thousands of detainees are at increasing risk for abuse, a leading human rights group said on Wednesday. Human Rights Watch has obtained reports of mass arrests in at least nine cities outside of Addis Ababa.
African Union-mediated peace talks on the crisis in Sudan’s Darfur region are set to open in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, on Friday, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo’s spokesperson said on Monday. Meanwhile, the International Criminal Court in The Hague said it will launch a war-crimes probe into atrocities committed in Darfur.
The chairperson of the African Union has rejected the group’s appointment of a mediator for crisis-hit Togo, saying he wasn’t properly consulted, officials said on Monday. Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, who currently holds the rotating AU chairmanship, has led West African efforts to resolve the Togo crisis.
A three-storey building, still under construction, collapsed in Port Harcourt in the Niger Delta on Thursday, killing three workers and a food vendor. The tragedy occurred in the early hours of Thursday as the workers were preparing to resume the day’s work, police spokesperson Thelma Fiberesua said in Port Harcourt.
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.