New sectarian slaughter rocks Nigeria

Most of the victims of the raid on a village in the Riyom region of Plateau state were women and children, state radio reported.

JOS, March 17, 2010 (AFP) - Muslim herdsmen disguised as soldiers butchered and then burned around a dozen Christians on Wednesday in Nigeria, close to the site of a recent sectarian massacre, officials and witnesses said.

Most of the victims of the raid on a village in the Riyom region of Plateau state were women and children, state radio reported, as locals accused the security forces of failing to act quickly enough to prevent the slaughter.

A reporter at the scene of the carnage in Byei village said that he had counted 12 bodies which bore deep machete cuts and had been partially burned. The state information commissioner put the overall toll at 13.

"I can confirm that 13 people have died while six others have been critically injured," Information Commissioner Gregory Yenlong told AFP.

Those wounded were now being treated at a missionary hospital in Vom, near the state capital Jos, he added.

Half a dozen homes had also been torched by the gang of killers, said the reporter. Surviving residents could be seen crying and wailing in grief.

Police spokesman Lerama Mohammed said the pre-dawn attack was believed to have been carried out by members of the mainly Muslim Fulani ethnic group which was behind another massacre in Plateau earlier this month.

"We received reports of an overnight attack on Riyom by people suspected to be Fulani herdsmen," Mohammed told AFP. "Our men are already there to assess the casuality and the situation."

Simon Wapmok, chairman of the local municaplity, was quoted as saying by Plateau state-owned radio that he alerted the police and military authorities about the attack which took place around 1:30 am, but that help came too late.

The attackers were said to be dressed in army camouflage when they stormed Riyom as residents were asleep, said the radio.

State police commissioner Ikechukwu Aduba visited the village on Wednesday morning and assured residents of their safety in the wake of the attack.

Aduba said 50 police and military personnel had been deployed to beef up security in Riyom.

On March 7 herdsmen from the mainly Muslim Fulani ethnic group launched an overnight attack on three mainly Christian Berom villages. Police say 109 people were killed in that attack although other officials put the figure at over 500.

The rampaging nomads slaughtered their victims, mostly women and children, in the dead of the night.

Some residents said the killings on March 7 were part of a spiralling feud between the Fulani, who are nomads, and Berom, who are farmers, which had been sparked by the theft of cattle, rather than for religious motives.

Yenlong appealed for calm after the latest attack and called on locals not to take the law into their own hands.

"Government will do all in its power to bring the perpetrators of this attack to justice," he said.

Previous violence in and around Jos has claimed several thousand lives.

The city lies on the dividing line between the Christian majority south and the mostly Muslim north.

There have been outbreaks of violence every few years since 2001, and some commentators attributed the March 7 slaughter to revenge for the killings of Muslims by Christians in January.

Analysts and critics have accused authorities of fostering a culture of impunity by failing to punish those arrested over previous attacks in Jos.

Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, is divided almost in the middle between the two faiths.