on Monday as survivors told horrific stories of Christian villagers
being trapped in nets and hacked to death by Muslim herdsmen.
Reports on the death toll differed wildly, with some
placing it at about 200 and others reporting 528 killed and thousands
injured. Casualty figures in the recurrent Muslim-Christian violence in
However attacks in January and on Sunday have left at least 500 dead, making it the worst violence here for some years.
Hundreds of nomadic Fulani herdsmen launched
coordinated attacks on three Christian villages of Dogo Nahawa, Ratsat
and Zot, just south of Jos at about
The killers planted nets and animal traps outside
huts of the villagers, mainly peasant farmers, then charged while
firing weapons, according to human rights lawyer
“People came out of their houses and started falling
into the animal traps and mosquito nets and then they were hacked
down,” he said. “They were the kind of traps used for wild animals.”
Plateau State, which lies on the divide between the
mainly Muslim north and largely Christian south, has seen thousands
killed in the last decade. Fulani herdsmen have accused a group of
indigenous Christians — the Berom — of attacking their camp last month,
killing four people and stealing 200 cattle.
Violence in the region, which appears unrelated to
ongoing national sectarian political tensions, has ethnic as well as
religious overtones. Many clashes have involved rampaging mobs of the
indigenous Christians and of Muslim settlers — the Hausa, who started
moving into the area early last century. The Muslim Fulani herdsmen,
who move through the area with their cattle, are less often involved.
But this year’s attacks have involved a more
sinister pattern: carefully planned and brutal, with hundreds of
villagers killed including babies, the elderly and anyone else unable
to flee.
“Even the kind of violence is unusual, because it
was not physical confrontations between Muslims and Christians. It was
an ambush. The attackers killed whoever they caught. It was mostly
women, who stayed behind to defend their children that became most of
the victims,” said rights lawyer Sani.
One survivor,
“They fired in the air, scared people out of their
houses and then attacked them with machetes as they tried to escape and
then burned their bodies. They set the houses ablaze. More than half of
the houses have been burned.”
The scene in the villages of Ratsat and Dogo Nahawa
was eerily silent Monday. Houses lay in ashes and the streets were
deserted, Survivors loaded bodies on trucks for the mass burial in Dogo
Nahawa.
During the ceremony, burial, many survivors wept and some pounced on a local Muslim journalist
beating him savagely and threatening to kill him because of his Muslim
name, witnesses said. Police had to fire shots to disperse the crowds
and rescue Hashim, who, according to witnesses, was punched, kicked and
nearly pushed into the mass grave..
Police said that dozens of suspects had been arrested but Sani cast doubt on whether the right people were apprehended.
“Arrests were made but these were not even at the
scene of the crime. They were just people arrested by police to save
face and say they were doing their job,” he said.
In the past, people have been arrested over violence but rarely convicted for lack of adequate evidence.
(Times staff writer
—
(c) 2010, Los Angeles Times.
Visit the Los Angeles Times on the Internet at http://www.latimes.com/
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
