Fourteen members of an extended family were killed by gunman Saturday night, continuing a cycle of violence that has been going for the last two weeks. The fighting has been between the Christians and the Muslims and at least 70 people have lost their lives in the last two weeks.
There was a reporter from Reuters at the scene of the massacre who saw fourteen bodies. According to witnesses, all of them were from one Christian family. There victims were either hacked to death or shot. The killers were Muslim Fulani herdsmen.
Moses Dalyop, the local council chairman said, “In the night around 12:30 a.m. we heard a strange noise. Those people who came to attack us were speaking the Fulani language and they were pointing at houses. They all dressed in military uniforms…One pregnant woman who was in labor was among those killed. They shot victims and [others] were macheted to death.”
The intense fighting started when a group of young people killed several Muslims when they were praying at the end of Ramadan. Now Muslim gangs and Christians are caught up in a horrid state of all out war on each other. The United Nations Human Rights Office has called on Nigeria to end the violence. With the latest killings, the death toll is now more than eighty and without intervention, it is only likely to get much worse.
The fighting is taking place in Plateau, a state which contains a Christian south and Muslim north. It’s normally fairly peaceful; however, there are occasional problems due to rivalries over ethnicity, religion, and fertile farmland. The violence in the region adds to Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan’s headaches over security. There have been bombings by Islamist insurgents in the capital and the northern part of the country. These bombings include one that killed 23 people in the United Nations capital.
Local officials have accused Nigeria’s security forces of not doing enough to curb the violence. Captain Charles Ekeocha, a spokesman for the military Special Task Force, though, said that they are doing as much as they can. Ekeocha also said that there has been one Fulani herdsman arrested who was suspected of a killing.
