At least six people were killed in southeastern Nigeria as a feud between a separatist group and a transport union degenerated into street battles, residents said on Saturday.
One witness said men armed with guns and machetes boarded a bus, forced all the passengers out and shot and beheaded one of them at the roadside.
“He was killed in my presence and his head was cut off,” said Charles Mbara, an estate agent, who was a passenger on the bus. The incident happened in the city of Onitsha on Friday.
“On my way back in the evening I saw five burnt corpses at several points in Upper Iweka. … We don’t know who the killers were,” he said.
A local Red Cross official said at least three people had been killed by stray bullets.
“There could be more deaths because it was not a one day activity,” said the official, who asked not to be named.
A police station in Onitsha was set ablaze on Saturday, but it was not clear who had started the fire, the Red Cross said.
Police have arrested 18 members of the banned Movement for the Actualisation of a Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) in the past two days in connection with fighting in Onitsha, area commander Matthew Uyanna said.
He said 6 policemen had been injured in clashes with suspected MASSOB activists, who had torched two police vehicles.
MASSOB denied responsibility for the violence.
“We are not responsible for the killings. We are not a militant group,” said Chidi Ajaegbu, a spokesman for the group.
MASSOB campaigns for the peaceful secession of southeastern Nigeria, a region dominated by the Ibo ethnic group. Hundreds of members have been arrested and the group’s leader, Ralph Uwazurike, is in jail facing a treason trial.
Residents say a feud between MASSOB and the National Association of Road Transport Owners (NARTO) has been under way for months but has escalated over the past few days.
Onitsha, a hectic, sprawling market city on the banks of the river Niger, is one of Nigeria’s most violent cities. About 100 people were killed there in February in retaliatory attacks by Ibo on ethnic Hausa residents after dozens of Ibo were killed in riots in Hausa cities in the north.