8 dead after Muslim attack on Christian village in Nigeria

Muslims attacked a Christian village in central Nigeria yesterday, axing eight people to death and burning seven houses and a church in fresh religious violence, an army spokesman said.

"It's true eight people were killed," Lieutenant Colonel Kingsley Umoh said.

An AFP correspondent saw the bodies, as well as the burnt houses and church in Mazzah village, near the city of Jos, where deadly religious clashes have occurred a number of times in recent months.

Umoh said Fulani Muslims entered Mazzah between 1.30 and 5 a.m., shooting sporadically in the air to lure sleeping residents outside their homes.

"Seven people were killed instantly with machetes while three others were seriously injured. One of them died on the way to the hospital," he said.

He said troop reinforcements had been deployed to Mazzah, some 14 kilometres from Jos, the capital of central Plateau State, to prevent the violence from escalating. The village was calm yesterday afternoon.

A senior state official, Gyang Pwajok, described the overnight attack on the mainly Christian village as an "act of terrorism".

Plateau State lies in the so-called middle belt between the predominantly Muslim north and the mainly Christian south.

Jos has long been the centre of ethnic and religious violence in a country whose 150 million-population is divided almost equally between Christians and Muslims.

In March, Muslim herdsmen from the Fulani and Hausa ethnic groups launched attacks on five Christian Berom villages near the city, killing more than 500 people, state officials say.