Scattered gunfire was heard in the northern Nigerian city of Maiduguri overnight despite a curfew imposed after days of clashes involving Muslim rebels which have killed at least 80 people across four states.
Members of a local Islamic group which wants a wider adoption of Islamic law across the nation have burned churches, a police station and a prison and clashed with the security forces in Bauchi, Borno, Kano and Yobe states.
Residents said youths armed with machetes, knives, bows and arrows, locally made hunting rifles and home-made explosives had attacked police buildings and anybody resembling a police officer or government official in Borno's capital Maiduguri.
"There was scattered gunfire during the night despite the curfew," a witness in the city said, adding the dusk-to-dawn measure may be extended.
Armed police manned roadblocks and patrolled the streets of Kano today but the city appeared to be calm. Soldiers and police also enforced a night time curfew in Bauchi, where the unrest began on Sunday, but there was no fresh violence.
The government has estimated 55 people have been killed but security sources and residents say the toll is much higher. One Nigerian newspaper with reporters around the region put the death toll at over 150 in Borno and Kano states alone.
More than 200 ethnic groups generally live peacefully side by side in the West African country, although civil war left one million people dead between 1967 and 1970 and there have been bouts of religious unrest since then.
The violence is unconnected to insecurity in the Niger Delta further south, where years of attacks by militants who say they want a fairer share of the country's natural wealth have crippled the mainstay oil industry.
The four northern states are among the 12 of Nigeria's 36 states that started a stricter enforcement of sharia in 2000 - a decision that has alienated sizeable Christian minorities and sparked bouts of sectarian violence that killed thousands.
A rebel group called Boko Haram, which opposes Western education and demands the adoption of sharia law in all of Nigeria, is behind the latest unrest.
"We do not believe in Western education. It corrupts our ideas and beliefs. That is why we are standing up to defend our religion," a senior member of the group, Abdulmuni Ibrahim Mohammed, said yesterday after his arrest in Kano state.
President Umaru Yar'Adua has ordered heightened security in the affected regions and directed police to take all necessary action to contain and repel the militants.
Boko Haram, which means "education illegal", began its string of attacks in the northeastern city of Bauchi on Sunday after the arrest of some of its members.
More than 50 Nigerians were killed and over 100 arrested in those clashes, prompting the Bauchi state governor to impose a night time curfew on the state's capital city.
Reuters