Police said yesterday they had arrested dozens of members of an Islamist sect and freed hundreds of civilians kidnapped by the group, after security forces crushed its violent uprising.
Authorities meanwhile cleared rotting corpses from the streets of this northern Nigerian city where attacks by extremists and fierce gun battles with police killed more than 600 people this week.
Police said yesterday they had arrested 36 suspected members of the sect, including two from neighbouring Niger, last Thursday. Yesterday's Punch newspaper published a picture of the suspects, most of whom appeared to be very young men.
Police also said they had rescued 230 young women and children kidnapped from several northern states and brought to the northeastern city of Maiduguri during the uprising.
One girl among them, Maimunatu Shuraim, 15, told AFP that the sect members herded them into waiting buses telling them they would learn "pure Islamic theology" in Maiduguri.
The group is opposed to western-style education which it says is corrupting young people.
The 36 suspects were arrested as they headed west for Lagos, the economic capital, from the capital Abuja, according to a statement by Abuja police chief Haruna John read out to reporters on Friday by his spokesman, Jimoh Moshood.
In Maiduguri, scene of the worst of this week's violence, an official of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Halima Bulama, expressed concern about the risk of disease from the decaying corpses.
"We are really worried about a possible outbreak of diseases like cholera due to the presence of decomposing corpses on the streets of Maiduguri which is constituting a serious health risk," she told AFP yesterday.
Her colleague, Ibrahim Aliyu, said: "the task of picking the decomposing bodies has started in earnest and it is going on well." He did not say how many bodies had been picked up so far.
Yesterday morning, authorities searched cars and questioned passers-by in the city, where an AFP reporter saw more than 30 decomposing bodies in three different districts.
Government spokesman Usman Chiroma said: "The government is making efforts to evacuate the dead bodies from the streets of Maiduguri. We have mobilised men and equipment for this job.