March 6, 2010
JOS, Nigeria (Reuters) - Scores of people were killed in clashes on Sunday between pastoralists and villagers close to the central Nigerian city of Jos, where sectarian violence killed hundreds in January, witnesses said.
JOS, Nigeria (Reuters) - Scores of people were killed in clashes on Sunday between pastoralists and villagers close to the central Nigerian city of Jos, where sectarian violence killed hundreds in January, witnesses said.A Reuters witness counted scores of bodies piled up in the village of Dogo Nahawa, just south of Jos, after what residents said was an overnight raid by pastoralists who shot into the air before slashing those who came out of their homes with machetes.
Pam Dantong, medical director of Plateau State Hospital in Jos, showed reporters 18 corpses that had been brought from the village, some of them charred and scarred by machete blows.
"They came around 3 o'clock in the morning and they started shooting into the air," said Dogo Nahawa resident Peter Jang.
"The shooting was just meant to bring people from their houses and then when people came out they started cutting them with machetes," he said, women crying behind him.
Four days of sectarian clashes in January between mobs armed with guns, knives and machetes killed hundreds of people in Jos, the capital of Plateau state, which lies at the crossroads of Nigeria's Muslim north and predominantly Christian south.
The latest unrest in the volatile region comes at a difficult time for Nigeria, with Acting President Goodluck Jonathan trying to assert his authority while the country's ailing leader Umaru Yar'Adua remains too sick to govern.
(Reporting by Shuaibu Mohammed; Writing by Nick Tattersall)
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