Security forces in the central Nigerian city of Jos shot into the air and fired tear gas on Monday to disperse youths near an opposition election rally.
Witnesses said several people had been injured and a member of one muslim youth group said three people had been killed. 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 told Reuters.
The witnesses said bursts of gunfire had rung out over the fracas, which erupted before a rally by former military ruler Muhammadu Buhari, the main rival to President Goodluck Jonathan in next month’s presidential election.
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.
The ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP) had also been planning a local campaign rally in Jos South, increasing the tensions, but had postponed it until Tuesday, residents said.
President Jonathan, the front runner ahead of the April 9 vote, is a Christian and the first head of state from the southern oil-producing Niger Delta. Buhari is a Muslim who commands strong popular support in parts of the north.
More than 200 people have been killed in sectarian violence since late last year in and around Jos, which lies in Nigeria’s “Middle Belt” between the mostly-Muslim north and predominantly Christian south.
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 north.
The violence is largely contained within one region of Africa’s most populous nation and does on its own not risk derailing presidential and parliamentary elections in April.