Death toll rises to 15 in northeast religious riots

At least 15 people have died as sectarian violence which first flared in the northeast Nigerian town of Numan at the weekend spread to nearby villages, the police said on Thursday. Hafiz Ringim, the police commissioner for Adamawa State, in which Numan is located, told reporters the violence also degenerated into widespread looting of homes and shops by hoodlums who took advantage of the unrest. Violence first broke out in the predominantly Christian town on Sunday after an itinerant Hausa-speaking Muslim trader with origins in the northwest, stabbed a Christian woman to death over a dispute. Mobs of Christian youths responded by burning the main mosque in the town along with other smaller ones and the buildings of prominent Muslims. But as police reinforced in the town, bands of local ethnic Bachama youths spread to nearby villages to hunt down Muslims and continued the reprisal attacks, Ringim said. A dusk-to-dawn curfew has been imposed on the entire Numan district and surrounding areas while further police reinforcements have been sent into the area to maintain peace, he said. Relations between Christians and Muslims in Nigeria have grown increasingly tense since twelve states in the country's predominantly Islamic north adopted strict Shariah law. The new legal code prescribes much harsher punishments for various offences than were previously applied. They include public flogging for drinking alcohol, the ampuation of limbs for stealing and stoning to death for adultery. Thousands of people have died in bouts of Christian, Muslim fighting across Nigeria in the last four years since Shari'ah implementation began. Africa's most populous country of more than 120 million people is roughly split between a mainly Muslim north and a largely Christian south.