KADUNA, Nigeria, 24 November 2002 — Riots raged on in the northern Nigerian city of Kaduna yesterday raising the death toll to 200 after a blood bath there forced the organizers of the Miss World pageant to abandon plans to hold the event in Nigeria.
Some 90 Miss World contestants prepared to leave their hotel yesterday to travel to London, where the contest will now be held.
Fighting that erupted three days ago during protests by youths against a blasphemous newspaper article on the beauty contest has degenerated into a bloody street war between Muslims and Christians, witnesses said.
Some 4,500 people have been driven from their homes in Kaduna by sectarian riots, the president of the Nigerian Red Cross told AFP yesterday.
Emmanuel Ijewere said: “Obviously there have been deaths as well, but it would be irresponsible to put a figure on casualties. We don’t want to increase tensions.
“Three hundred and twenty people are being treated in hospitals. We have sent tents and blankets,” he added.
As gunfire spread to the city’s rundown southern suburbs an AFP journalist was forced to join around a 1,000 terrified residents who fled their homes for refuge in the Kronenbourg brewery near the main road to Abuja, which was protected by troops and an armored car.
“We had to run for our lives. They came to my house in two cars and tried to burn it. We really don’t know what is happening,” 20-year-old Julie Adabo told AFP.
Another woman said that a gang came to kill her after burning her home but later spared her life. One man said he had seen his brother cut down before him.
As Adabo spoke, shooting could be heard from the Trikania district around the plant and several buildings, including family homes, could be seen burning.
Stanley Yakubu, a local newspaper reporter, told AFP that he had seen at least 10 bodies — three of them demonstrators shot dead by police — in one suburb, Sabon Tasha. “The police were firing indiscriminately,” he said.
A rights group claimed that rogue troops dragged 14 men from their homes and executed them in the street during rioting in Kaduna.
Shehu Sani, head of the Civil Rights Congress, told AFP that the men were killed during the fighting on Friday.
An AFP reporter saw the 14 bodies in two separate locations in the Karbala area of the city late Friday.
They appeared to have been shot dead and burned, but the reporter could not confirm who carried out the killings.
In another part of the city AFP also met 57-year-old Bello Mijimyawa, standing over the corpses of his two sons, aged 17 and 25.
He said they had been dragged from his house by soldiers and later found dead and burned.
Miss World’s organizers announced early yesterday that they would quit Nigeria and seek to hold the Dec. 7 ceremony, which was scheduled to take place in the Nigerian capital Abuja, in London instead. The trouble broke out in Kaduna on Wednesday when Muslim youths, incensed by an article in Nigerian daily This Day, burned down a local newspaper office. (Agencies)
