Nigerian toll 'more than 200'
2004-05-10 12:37
Lagos - The final death toll following last week's attack by a Christian ethnic militia on a mainly-Muslim Nigerian town was between 200 and 300, the government said on Monday, scaling back earlier reported figures.
The previous official toll for the May 2 attack had been only 67, but last week local officials and Nigerian Red Cross staff said at the scene of the killing that at least 630 people had been slaughtered.
A spokesperson for the National Emergency Management Agency, Ibrahim Farinloye, said that a government team had visited the town of Yelwa to investigate and to provide relief materials, and now believed the death toll was lower.
He said that the death toll was "less than half" the reported figure, but more than 200. He admitted, however, that authorities were keen to downplay the scale of the killing, in order to minimise the risk of reprisal attacks.
"That is why we are trying to downplay the mass grave," he said.
Last week Yelwa residents showed reporters and a Red Cross team a fresh burial plot they said had been filled with 630 corpses after the Tarok militia raided their Hausa-Fulani neibghours in an ethnically motivated attack.
But Farinloye said that the grave had been in use for some time, and that not all the bodies in it were recent. Yelwa has been attacked five times in the last two years, he said.
The attack on Yelwa, a market town in a disputed area of Plateau State 300 kilometres east of the federal capital of Abuja, has raised fears that further sectarian or ethnic attacks might follow in Africa's most populous nation.