Police arrest 286, charge 150 for riots

A total of 286 people have been arrested and more than 150 charged over riots that rocked Nigeria's northern city of Kano last weekend, police authorities said on Wednesday. "More than 150 suspects have been taken to courts," Yakubu Bello Uba, head of the police in Kano State told reporters without giving further details of when and where they were charged. But Uba said 286 people had been arrested, adding that the official death toll had risen from 18 to 32 deaths. Humanitarian sources and residents say up to 200 people were killed in the violence that followed a demonstration by Muslims in Kano last Friday to protest U.S. air strikes against Afghanistan. President Olusegun Obasanjo visited Kano, northern Nigeria's biggest city, on Tuesday to assess the extent of the damage and condemned the violence, urging Nigerians not to associate Islam with violence. "We have to be very careful so we are not seen by the outside world as not differentiating between religion and terrorism," he told thousands of displaced people taking refuge at the city's main military barracks. "We will not tolerate irresponsibility, destruction of lives and property and people taking laws into their hands. Whatever it takes, we will stand and we will fight against it," he added. Red Cross officials in the city said at least 17,000 displaced people were receiving relief assistance from the agency. Many of them are Christians of the Igbo and Yoruba ethnic groups from the south, who dominate commerce in the city and were the main victims of the rioting. Police and other security agencies are maintaining a nationwide alert to avert the outbreak of reprisal attacks against northern Muslims resident in the mainly Christian south of Nigeria, as has been the pattern in recent years whenever religious violence broke out in the Muslim-dominated north. A statement on Wednesday by the Oodua People's Congress, which purports to defend the interests of the southwest Yoruba ethnic group, said the group intended to carry out revenge attacks against Hausa-speaking northerners. The OPC said it believed the recent "riots in Kano were not against America as claimed but against Yoruba and Igbo people".