Nigeria’s Vice President Goodluck Jonathan pledged to pursue those responsible for last week’s religious riots in the central city of Jos that left hundreds dead, and to use the “full weight of the law” against them.
“I’ve asked the police to continue investigations exhaustively,” Jonathan said yesterday after visiting the city, according to a statement on the Web site of the Presidency. “Prosecution will be pursued to the last level of litigation.”
More than 400 people died and 4,000 people were injured in three days of fighting between Christians and Muslims that erupted in Jos on Jan. 17, according to the Civil Rights Congress, a Nigerian human rights group. The city had seen similar outbursts of violence in 2001 and 2005.
“This is not the first outbreak of deadly violence in Jos, but the government has shockingly failed to hold anyone accountable” for the previous attacks, Corinne Dufka, senior West Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement on Jan. 21.
The state’s acting police commissioner, Ikechukwu Aduba, told reporters yesterday that police currently estimate that 326 people died in the disturbances. At least 313 people have been arrested, 139 of whom have been transferred to Abuja for further investigation, he said.
Jonathan, who’s running the country in the absence of the ailing President Umaru Yar’Adua, ordered troops to take over security in Jos on Jan. 21 to stop the problem spreading to other parts of the country. Yar’Adua, 58, has not been seen in public since he was flown to a Saudi Arabian hospital on Nov. 23 for treatment of a heart condition.
Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, with 140 million people, is divided between a predominantly Muslim north and a largely Christian south.