Bodies were yesterday being pulled from wells and cesspits in a Nigerian village riven by four days of rioting between Christians and Muslims.

As many as 400 people may have died in and around the town of Jos last week before Nigerian authorities deployed the military to contain violence, some reports suggested last night. Official sources, however, offered smaller numbers.

The New York-based Human Rights Watch yesterday said it believed Muslims in Jos and neighbouring villages had been targeted for a deliberate massacre.

Muhammad Tanko Shittu, a senior mosque official organising mass burials in Jos, said more than 200 bodies had been found in a nearby village called Kuru Karama.

Both Shittu and Red Cross officials said they were still counting bodies and could not yet give an exact toll.

Human Rights Watch said groups of armed men attacked the mostly Muslim population of Kuru Karama on Tuesday, 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 unrest around the capital of Plateau state, which lies at the crossroads of Nigeria’s Muslim north and predominantly Christian south, underscores the fragility of Africa’s most populous nation as it approaches the campaign period for 2011 elections with uncertainty over who is in charge.   »»» Scotsman.com News (U.K.)

The God of Abraham, in his revealed Word to Muslims (the Qur’an) and Christians (the Gospel) commands love and respect for all people. In this case, the Christians of Nigeria seem to have forgotten that Jesus (peace be on him) teaches them that they are to love all, even their enemies, and to do good to all, even to those who hate them. Surely the innocent men, women and children whom they savagely killed and threw into wells, poisoning the water for the survivors, did not deserve their violent end.

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