Clashes kill more than 100 in central Nigeria - Reuters AlertNet - 0 views
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JOS, Nigeria, March 7 (Reuters) - More than 100 people were killed in clashes on Sunday between Islamic pastoralists and Christian villagers near the central Nigerian city of Jos, where sectarian violence killed hundreds in January, witnesses said.
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Four days of sectarian clashes in January between mobs armed with guns, knives and machetes killed hundreds of people in Jos, the capital of Plateau state, which lies at the crossroads of Nigeria's Muslim north and predominantly Christian south. The latest unrest in the volatile region comes at a difficult time for Nigeria, with Acting President Goodluck Jonathan trying to assert his authority while the country's ailing leader Umaru Yar'Adua remains too sick to govern.
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A Reuters witness who visited the village counted around 100 bodies piled in the open air. Pam Dantong, medical director of Plateau State Hospital in Jos, showed reporters 18 corpses that had been brought from the village, some of them charred. Officials said other bodies had been taken to a second hospital in the state capital. It was not immediately clear what triggered the violence.
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The instability underscores the fragility of Africa's most populous nation as it approaches the campaign period for 2011 elections with uncertainty over who is in charge. Yar'Adua returned from three months in a Saudi hospital, where he was being treated for a heart condition, a week and a half ago but has still not been seen in public. Presidency sources say he remains in a mobile intensive care unit.
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Apart from the violence in Plateau state, there is also potential for fresh instability in the Niger Delta, the heartland of the country's mainstay oil and gas industry, after a militant splinter group last week claimed two attacks on oil facilities.