Christians flee attack

2004-05-21 09:01

Sabon Gida, Nigeria - Hundreds of Christians were fleeing this remote Nigerian village on Thursday following an attack by Muslim militiamen, leaving behind a ragtag gang of lightly-armed youths to protect their homes.

Villagers from Sabon Gida, an impoverished cluster of mud-brick huts in central Nigeria's strife-torn Plateau State, told reporters that they were attacked in the early hours of Tuesday by Fulani gunmen.

"Seven villages have been attacked, they killed 25 people. I saw 25 dead bodies myself," said Pastor Mangmwos Tangshak, head of the local branch of the Christian Association of Nigeria. Police officers could only confirm five dead.

The attack on Sabon Gida and neighbouring Christian communities is the latest atrocity in a three-year-old battle between rival religious and ethnic groups for control of Plateau State's fertile farmlands.

It came on the same day that Nigeria's President Olusegun Obasanjo declared a state of emergency in the state, replacing its elected governor by the region's former military administrator tasked with restoring peace.

Slaughter

On May 2, Christian militiamen attacked the Muslim market town of Yelwa, 300km east of Abuja, slaughtering more than 200 people and sending shockwaves across this nation of 130 million people.

In reprisal Muslim youths went on the rampage in the northern city of Kano, killing dozens of Christians, and in a televised address Obasanjo declared the violence a "danger to the security and unity of the nation".

Plateau State's police chief, Commissioner Innocent Iluozoke, said that the latest attack on Sabon Gida was carried out by Muslim members of the Hausa and Fulani ethnic groups who came over the border from Nassarawa State.

His account was confirmed by witnesses in the village, as they piled their belongings onto carts, overloaded cars, motorbikes and even bicycles and fled, heading for the relative safety of Kwande, a nearby Christian town.

Most women and children appeared to have already left, but a small group of young men, visibly drunk, had armed themselves with locally made hunting rifles, bows and arrows and machetes to defend the village.

Dozens of houses had been burned, most of them simple mud and thatch structures, apart from the village pastor's tin-roofed, cinderblock bungalow, which had been burned, ransacked and destroyed.

- AFP