JOS – Riot police patrolled the central Nigerian city of Jos on Monday after Christmas Eve bombings killed more than 30 people and sparked clashes two days later between Muslim and Christian youths.
A series of explosions on Friday killed at least 32 people and wounded more than 100, triggering Sunday’s violence in which buildings were set alight and shots were fired. Aloysius Okorie, deputy inspector general of the police, said reinforcements had been sent to the scene of the fighting and talked down the severity of the unrest.
“Four mobile anti-riot police units have been deployed from Bauchi, Benue, Kano and Gombe states to assist the units on the ground in Jos to arrest the situation,” Okorie said. “The situation is now under control.”
A Reuters correspondent visited a hospital with the chief of the defence staff, who went from bed to bed offering apologies to nearly 40 people who suffered injuries in Friday’s blasts.
One casualty said he had heard the explosions and rushed to help the wounded, when the army arrived and fired shots.
“I was trying to drag out victims from the bombs, when I was shot by a soldier,” John James said from his hospital bed.
A Red Cross support team was stretched by the number of casualties in hospitals around Jos, the capital of Plateau state, but said increased security measures had defused some of the tension in the region. Robin Waudo, spokesman for the Red Cross, said as of Sunday evening, 101 wounded people were being treated in hospital.
“We have a team of people coming from our office in Kano today to aid the work the Red Cross are doing here. There is a heavy security presence around Jos to try and secure the situation,” Waudo said.
Hundreds of people died in religious and ethnic clashes at the start of the year in the Middle Belt of Africa’s most populous nation, where the mostly Muslim north meets the largely Christian south.
The tensions are built on decades of resentment between indigenous groups, mostly Christian or animist, who are vying for control of fertile farmlands and for economic and political power with mostly Muslim migrants and settlers from the north.
President Goodluck Jonathan has pledged to hunt down those responsible for the bombings but the government has not said who might be responsible for the violence. While religious conflict flares up sporadically in central Nigeria, co-ordinated bomb attacks have not featured in previous unrest and the governor for Plateau state has said those responsible for the blasts were politically motivated.
Jonathan will been keen to quickly resolve the latest bout of violence as the religious divide draws attention to tensions surrounding his bid to lead Nigeria’s main party in a presidential election next April.
An informal ruling party pact says power within the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) should rotate between the north and south of the country every two terms.
