Our God is Better than Your God!! Or Wait Till you See Your Gasoline Prices Jump

washingtonpost.com

Religious Riots Continue in Nigeria
Christian Mobs Attack Muslims Over Cartoon Violence

By Craig Timberg
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 22, 2006; 10:37 AM

ONITSHA, Nigeria, Feb. 22 -- Religious riots sparked by the publishing of cartoons of the prophet Muhammad continued into their fifth day in Nigeria as Christian mobs in this southern city attacked Muslim motorists, leaving at least 22 dead. Nationwide, the toll was at least 65 dead and likely to rise.

Thousands of refugees also huddled at police stations and army barracks near here to avoid hordes of angry young men bent on avenging days of killings in northern Nigeria cities.

"They've been killing our brothers and sisters in the north," men shouted Wednesday morning, according to motorist Afoma Clara Adigwe, 40, shortly after driving through Onitsha. She escaped the mobs, she said, only by speaking the Ibo language dominant in this heavily Christian section of Nigeria.

Nigerian news reports put the death toll at 22, but that appeared low. At least 19 bodies were visible along the road within several hundred feet of the Head Bridge, a massive steel-girder crossing of the Niger River. The bodies appeared to have been beaten and, in several cases, burned beyond recognition. Discarded sandals and the round, decorative hats favored by Muslims from northern Nigeria were left behind in the dirt.

The road, controlled by dozens of police and soldiers, bore black burn marks. Adigwe and other witnesses said there were at least 14 other bodies, including several that had been decapitated and mutilated, farther from the bridge, in an area where mobs remained in control. Five other bodies were in a morgue, authorities said, in the nearby city of Asaba.

"Horrible," Adigwe said. "I just closed my eyes it's so horrible." Her traveling companion, magazine editor Tony Iweka, 45, said one man in the mob displayed what appeared to be a freshly decapitated head in his right hand.

News reports also said that the mobs burned two mosques in Onitsha. The rioting began, the reports said, on Tuesday morning after a bus arrived in the city carrying the bodies of Christian victims killed by mobs in the predominantly Muslim northeastern city of Maiduguri on Saturday. At least 18 Christians were killed and 30 churches were burned there.

Those attacks were followed on Monday by rioting in another northern and mostly Muslim city, Bauchi, where 25 died over two days.

Nigeria, a country of 130 million people, is split roughly in half between a mostly Muslim north and a Christian and animistic south, but most areas contain a mixture of all three religious groups after centuries of migration and extensive trading. The Hausa are the main ethnic group in the predominantly Muslim north, while Onitsha is in the heartland of the Ibo Christian group.

Religious violence in one part of the country often sparks reprisal killings elsewhere in Nigeria.

Nigerian security forces guarded churches and mosques and patrolled streets in several Nigerian cities in an attempt to quell the rising sectarian tensions.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company