JOS, Nigeria (Reuters) – Mosque and government officials have pulled more bodies from wells and sewage pits in a village near the Nigerian city of Jos, victims of what Human Rights Watch said appeared to have been a targeted massacre.
Four days of clashes between Christian and Muslim mobs armed with guns, knives and machetes killed hundreds of people in Jos and surrounding communities this week before Vice President Goodluck Jonathan deployed the military to contain the violence.
Muhammad Tanko Shittu, a senior mosque official organising mass burials in Jos, told Reuters yesterday he had just returned from Kuru Jantar, a village also known as Kuru Karama or Kuru Gada Biu, where more than 200 bodies had been found.
“So many bodies were dumped into wells and were littered around, others were being evacuated by the federal authorities,” he said. Both Shittu and Red Cross officials said they were still counting bodies and could not yet give an overall toll.
Some estimates have put the death toll at more than 400, although official figures have been much lower.
US-based Human Rights Watch said groups of armed men attacked the mostly Muslim population of Kuru Karama on Jan. 19, burning some alive and killing others as they tried to flee. It urged Jonathan to order an investigation of “credible reports of a massacre of at least 150 Muslim residents”.
“They were armed with cutlasses, guns, sticks and bags of stone. It was not the Christians from our community but those from outside who came,” one 32-year-old resident of Kuru Karama, who was not named, told Human Rights Watch.
“The children were running helter-skelter. The men were trying to protect the women. People who ran into the bush were killed. Some were burned in the mosque and some went to the houses and were burned,” he said.
