Muslims Say 300 People Killed in Attacks by Christian Militia

May 5, 2004

Source: Yahoo! News

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/040505/325/eswoz.html

On May 5, 2004 Yahoo! News posted a Reuters article that reported, "Nigeria's top Muslim leader says 300 people, mostly Muslims, were killed in Sunday's attacks by Christian militia in the town of Yelwa in the central Plateau state. Justice Abdulkadir Orire, secretary general of the Jama'atu Nasril Islam, described the killings in the remote farming town as 'genocide' and said they took the death toll from three months of ethnic violence there to at least 700-800 people. 'The information we have is that 300 people died and they are mostly Muslims. We call it a genocide because they are killing women and children,' Orire told Reuters in a telephone interview from his Kaduna headquarters. The conflict between the Christian Tarok tribe and Muslim Fulani is rooted in competing claims over the fertile farmlands at the heart of Africa's most populous nation, and it is fuelled by religious and ethnic differences between the groups."