39 die in Nigeria clashes

BAUCHI, Nigeria, (Agencies) - Nigerian police went on to red alert across the country Tuesday after violence in Bauchi, a northern Nigerian city, claimed 39 lives, according to police and witnesses.
The Red Cross in Nigeria said many of those who were killed in clashes on Monday between troops and members of a sect, Kala-Kato, were children.
Adamu Abubakar, its representative in the northern state, told the BBC 39 people had died - some 60pc of them students aged between nine and 15. Local officials said if any children had died, it would have been because they were hit by vehicles or trampled. Twenty members of the sect had been arrested, Abubakar said.
The Red Cross representative said the crisis was the result of preaching at an open-air gathering, after which members of the Kala Kato sect threatened to kill locals who would not join them or leave the area. An army officer who was sent from a nearby base to speak to the sects leaders was killed with a machete, he added. Abubakar said most of the dead were children from outside Bauchi who had been sent to study Arabic and the Koran with local clerics.
But a spokesman for the government of Bauchi, Alhaji Sanusi Mohammed, told the BBC that 32 people had died in the violence, and that most of the people killed were adult members of the sect who had attacked the security forces.
Scores of armed soldiers and policemen deployed to key areas of the troubled Zango area and were keeping a keen watch, though calm had been restored after Mondays clashes, reported an AFP correspondent in Bauchi.
The Nigerian police chief, Ogbonnaya Onovo, has placed all other states in the country on red alert following the bloody Bauchi incident, national police spokesman, Emmanuael Ojuykwu, said Tuesday in a statement.
In Bauchi, commercial activities and the movement of people and vehicles have resumed as normal. Bauchi State police chief Atikur Kafur said Kala-Kato sect leader Badamasi Saleh Alkaleri was killed by security forces.
At least seven houses, several cars and motorcycles were burnt during the clashes.
As calm returned Tuesday to the area, hundreds of residents who fled the fighting were returning to assess the damage the violence has wrought on the area.
Most of the residents who fled to the bush around the neighbourhood while the fighting raged were brought back home on Tuesday by policemen who combed the hideouts where they passed the night, the police chief told AFP.
We are quite happy that the violence is short-lived, we feared that it would be another Boko Haram experience, said Baraka Nasir, a Zango resident who returned to her mud house on Tuesday, with her seven-month old baby.
In July at least 800 people were killed when security forces crushed an uprising in Bauchi, Kano, Yobe and Borno states in the Muslim-dominated north of Nigeria by members of Boko Haram, another radical Islamic sect opposed to Western education.