The main opposition candidate in Nigeria’s presidential election, former military ruler Muhammadu Buhari, accused the police on Tuesday of killing four of his supporters at an election rally this week.
Security forces in the central city of Jos, where sectarian violence has killed at least 200 people since the end of last year, shot into the air and fired tear gas on Monday to disperse youths near to Buhari’s rally. [ID:nLDE72K1MY]
Buhari’s spokesman Yinka Odumakin accused the police in the state, whose governor is from the ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP), of preventing supporters from getting to the rally and then opening fire to quell supposed unrest.
“It was at the end of the rally that we got report that the police, acting out the PDP script, waylaid thousands of our supporters,” Odumakin said in a statement.
“The police subsequently fired gunshots into the crowd, killing four people and wounding several,” he said.
Residents said youths who were coming for the rally by Buhari’s Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) party had been threatening to loot shops in Fari Gada, a neighbourhood in Jos North, leading the security forces to intervene.
One witness, Sanusi Sani, told Reuters he had helped carry three bodies to the local mosque and several injured people to hospital but police commissioner Abdulrahman Akano denied there had been casualties.
“Some youths came out in the morning. In no time at all we cleared their roadblock,” he said.
Jos lies in Nigeria’s “Middle Belt” between the mostly Muslim north, where Buhari commands strong support, and the predominantly Christian south, from where Jonathan hails.
There have been frequent clashes between Christian and Muslim mobs in villages around the city since a series of bombs were detonated during Christmas Eve celebrations in December, killing scores of people.
A police and army taskforce arrested two men carrying explosives on a motorbike on Tuesday. The suspects led them to a house in the “Millionaires Quarters” neighbourhood where bomb making equipment was found, spokesman Charles Ekeocha said.
On Sunday, two men were killed when the explosives they were carrying on a motorbike went off, preventing what residents said was an attempted attack on a Christian community. [ID:nLDE72J09Y]
The tensions are 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.
The violence is largely contained within one region of Africa’s most populous nation and does not on its own threaten to derail presidential and parliamentary elections in April, though the area is a potential flashpoint during local polls.