Miss World riots leave 100 dead
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/2501893.stm
A Red Cross official in Nigeria says at least 100 people have been killed
in riots in the city of Kaduna started by Muslim youths angered by the Miss
World contest.
A heavy security presence has been imposed on the streets of the northern
Nigerian city after two days of protests.
Nigeria Hosting Miss World after Miss Nigeria won last year's contest
A Red Cross spokesman said Kaduna was very tense and the security situation
made it difficult to get accurate reports of casualties.
Kaduna - one of Nigeria's most volatile cities - was reported to be quiet
after an overnight curfew.
More than 2,000 people died in clashes there between Christians and Muslims
two years ago.
Rampage
Protests started after a newspaper article said the Prophet Mohammed would
probably have chosen to marry one of the contestants if he had witnessed
the beauty pageant.
Thousands of Muslim youths rampaged through the suburbs of the city,
erecting barricades of burning tyres, setting fire to buildings, and
attacking churches.
A spokesman for the Miss World contest told the BBC it would go ahead as
planned.
Miss World events are only taking place in the southern, largely Christian
and animist, part of the country.
Muslim groups complain that the contest is un-Islamic and are also upset
that it began during the holy month of Ramadan.
Text message
Earlier reports said 12 people had been killed.
Then on Friday morning a Kaduna-based organisation, the Civil Rights
Congress, put the number much higher.
"We had been able to move around at night with the help of the security
forces and our workers around the city counted more than 40 dead", the
group's president Shehu Sani told Reuters news agency.
Shortly after that, the Red Cross said the death toll had reached more than
100.
Armed security men had been posted all over the city, stopping and
searching people, he said.
The trouble in Kaduna escalated on Thursday after hundreds of people
chanting "Allahu Akbar" (God is great) attacked the office of ThisDay
newspaper the previous day.
Schools and shops hurriedly closed as crowds of young men ignited makeshift
street barricades and ignited makeshift barricades, sending up plumes of
black smoke, the Associated Press reported.
Hundreds of police and soldiers were deployed to restore calm.
Local mosques had been calling for action against the paper and said that
some people were first alerted to the article by text messages being sent
to their mobile phones.
Foreign dimension
The government has issued a statement, appealing for calm and assuring
Muslims that those responsible for the ThisDay article would be brought to
book, for exceeding "the bounds of responsible journalism."
ThisDay has retracted the offending article and has published apologies.
The chairman of the group that owns the Lagos-based paper suggested that a
computer glitch could be to blame for the fact that the story went to press
in the first place.
The holding of the Miss World contest in Nigeria has also provoked
international controversy.
It had been threatened by a boycott by beauty queens after a woman
convicted of adultery, Amina Lawal, was sentenced to death by a Sharia court.
The Nigerian Government moved to calm fears by promising it will not allow
any Nigerian to be stoned to death.
About 90 Miss World contestants have arrived in Nigeria, ahead of the final
contest in the capital, Abuja, on 7 December.
