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Muslim youths hacked
a Christian family of eight to death in Nigeria's
volatile Plateau state on Sunday, local officials
said, continuing a week of violence that has pitted
gangs from the two faiths against each other and
civilians.
More than 40 people
have been killed in the ethnically and
religiously-mixed area since last Monday when
Christian youths attacked some Muslims as they
gathered to celebrate the end of Ramadan in the city
of Jos, capital of Plateau state.
Plateau state
spokesman Yiljap Abraham took journalists to the
house in the village of Tatu, where the bodies of
the eight victims from the latest attack were still
lying on the bloodsoaked floor.
On Sunday morning,
in another village in Plateau called Riyom, police
found a bomb planted in a marketplace which had
failed to go off because its battery had run flat,
Sergeant Willford Egwu told journalists.
Plateau state,
straddling the "Middle Belt" between Nigeria's
mostly Muslim north and largely Christian south,
though normally peaceful, has sometimes been a
flashpoint for tensions between the two faiths.
Unrest there is a
new security issue for President Goodluck Jonathan,
also coping with near-daily attacks in the northeast
by Islamist sect Boko Haram, which authorities blame
for an August 26 bombing of U.N. offices in Abuja
that killed 23 people.
Suspected Boko Haram
militants shot dead an outspoken Muslim cleric who
had criticised the group, Lieutenant-Colonel Hassan
Mohammed from Nigeria's joint military task force
told Reuters. The men shot him in a raid on his home
on Sunday in Maiduguri, the city at the heart of the
Boko Haram insurgency.
On Saturday at least
four people including one soldier were killed in
clashes between local youths and security forces in
the town of Biu in the northeast near Maiduguri, a
senior police officer told Reuters.
"The fracas broke
out on Friday night when the youth ambushed one
soldier and killed him close to the Army Barracks in
retaliation to the killing of a woman and the arrest
of four Islamic clerics," the source said.
REUTERS
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