BAUCHI, Nigeria – Attackers have killed at least 16 people and set
fire to more than a dozen houses in a town in northern Nigeria that has been
beset by years of sectarian violence, police said late on Friday.
Residents said the attack on the town of Tafawa Balewa in Bauchi state
appeared to have been an act of retaliation for earlier killings in the area,
although police said the perpetrators had yet to be identified.
"Sixteen people have been confirmed killed by unidentified attackers," Bauchi
police commissioner John Aba Kasanga said.
Bauchi neighbours Plateau state in Nigeria's "Middle Belt," a region where
the mostly Muslim north meets the predominantly Christian south and where
communities from different ethnic and religious backgrounds sit side by
side.
The tension is rooted in 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 migrants and settlers from the Muslim
north.
There have been frequent clashes between Christian and Muslim mobs in
villages around Jos, the capital of Plateau state, as well as in Bauchi.
Hundreds of people were killed in violence around Jos in the first few months of
the year.
At least 500 people were killed last month in protests and reprisal killings
after President Goodluck Jonathan, a Christian from the south, was declared
winner of a presidential election, beating northern Muslim and former army ruler
Muhammadu Buhari.
There were protests in towns across the north but the worst of the violence
was in the southern part of Kaduna state, which neighbours Plateau and shares
the ethnic and religious diversity of the rest of the Middle Belt.
Jonathan, who had widespread support in the south but also gained millions of
votes in the north, has promised an "all-inclusive" government to try to heal
the rifts.
Buhari's Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) party has said it has evidence
that electoral commission computers were rigged and that the vote count was
manipulated in Jonathan's favor. It has vowed to contest the outcome in
court.
On Friday the party asked a tribunal to compel the electoral commission to
preserve all the ballot boxes and data capture machines used in the polls for
forensic examination and to allow it access to the new biometric voter register
so it could cross check thumbprints on ballot papers. Reuters
