Deadly cartoon protests in north spark reprisals in south

Several people were reported killed in southern Nigeria on Tuesday in revenge attacks following deadly riots last weekend in the north in which Muslims targeted Christians over caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in European newspapers. On Tuesday, bands of youths armed with clubs, machetes and petrol cans rampaged through the streets of Onitsha in Nigeria’s predominantly Christian south, attacking Muslims and their properties, killing several people, according to several residents. “I have seen three corpses myself and have spoken to other people who saw at least three in other districts,” Okechukwu Nwaka, a spare parts trader in Onitsha told IRIN. Police and officials were not immediately available for confirmation. The violence came days after attacks against Christians in the northern city of Maiduguri on Saturday, in which police said at least 17 people were killed and 30 churches razed. Another violent protest on Monday left at least five dead in the mainly Muslim city of Bauchi. In the Onitsha violence, thousands of northerners fled to the city’s main military barracks for refuge, other witnesses said. Initially published in a Denmark newspaper in September, the cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad have sparked outrage among Muslims worldwide. Nigeria’s more than 126 million people are roughly divided between a mainly Muslim north and a south populated largely by Christians and followers of other traditional faiths. Thousands of people have died in sporadic violence since 2000, when a dozen predominantly Muslim states in the north began applying strict Islamic legal code or Shari’ah, amid rising apprehension among Christians suspecting hegemonic designs. Initial protests against the cartoons by Nigerian Muslims were relatively peaceful however.