Nigeria’s National Emergency Management Agency said 80 people have been confirmed dead from Christmas Eve blasts in the central city of Jos.
“The death toll has increased to 80 as at yesterday,” Yushau Shuaib, a spokesman for the agency known as NEMA, said today by phone from Abuja, the capital. “For this figure we’re relying on bodies we’ve counted.”
Multiple bomb attacks were carried out by unknown assailants in the city on Dec. 24 targeting public places, including a Catholic church. Police initially said at least 32 people were killed in the blasts.
Sectarian violence between Christians and Muslims in Jos, the capital of Plateau state, has left hundreds of people dead this year. At least 492 people were killed in an attack on a predominantly Christian village by Muslim Fulani herders near Jos on March 7 this year, said Civil Rights Congress, a local rights group.
Jos, the capital of Plateau state, falls in the middle of Africa’s most populous country of more than 140 million people, roughly split between a mainly Muslim north and a predominantly Christian south. At least 14,000 people have died in ethnic and religious violence since 1999 in Nigeria, according to the Brussels-based International Crisis Group.
Task Force Deployed
The Christmas Eve attacks sparked reprisal violence by rival gangs of youths targeting perceived enemies and burning buildings, prompting additional police and military reinforcements to the city. At least four people were killed and 20 houses burnt in different parts of the city, Abdulrahman Akano, the police commissioner in charge of the city told reporters yesterday.
A special military task force deployed to help quell the violence yesterday arrested three men who were trying to attack buildings with dynamite in the Dogon-Karfe district of the city, Captain Charles Okocha, a military spokesman, told reporters yesterday.
Nigeria is Africa’s biggest oil producer and the fifth- largest source of U.S. oil imports.