Nigerian Moslems Flee Violence they Started!

ONITSHA, Nigeria - Moslems fled this southeast Nigerian city and corpses still smoldered in its streets Thursday as two days of sectarian violence that killed more than 50 people subsided.

Onitsha has borne the brunt of a wave of sectarian violence across the country, sparked by weekend protests against caricatures of the Prophet Moham-mad. The violence is the worst of its kind since 2004, when Moslem-Christian skirmishes in northern Plateau and Kano states killed more than 700 people. Thousands of people have died in religious violence, often interwoven with ethnic rivalries, since 2000.

On Thursday in Onitsha, angry Christians defaced a mosque destroyed a day earlier. At least nine bodies could be seen laying charred in the dirt streets of riverside city, and three corpses burned on a pyre of old tires.

A spokeswoman for the Nigerian Red Cross, Umo Okon, said there were 925 victims of violence in Onitsha over the two days, including deaths, injuries and people displaced from their homes. She didn't have an exact breakdown.

On the outskirts of Onitsha, several hundred Moslems fled, boarding trucks headed north. Nigeria is roughly divided between a predominantly Moslem north and a mainly Christian south.

A spokeswoman for the neighboring city of Asaba, across the Niger River, said 5,000 refugees were sheltering in police barracks there.

Soldiers and policemen patrolled in armored personnel carriers and trucks, providing protection for health workers picking up dead bodies from the streets, Emeka Uzoatu, an Onitsha resident and company manager, said Thursday.

"Everything appears calm right now, but most people are staying back at home and are too scared to go out," Uzoatu said.

In most parts of the city, however, shops were open and streets busy.

Gov. Chris Ngige extended a curfew imposed on Onitsha to the nearby towns of Nnewi and Awka, the state capital, after Moslem northerners had been attacked and killed in those places on Wednesday, the local government-owned radio station reported.

Deaths have also been reported by residents in violence the same day against Moslems in Enugu, a mainly Christian and ethnic Igbo-dominated city, some 60 miles north of Onitsha.

Saturday in the northern city of Maiduguri, Moslem protests against cartoons caricaturing the Prophet Moham-mad turned violent, razing 30 churches and claiming the lives of 18 people, mostly Christians.

Similar violence followed Monday and Tuesday in the northern city of Bauchi, where witnesses and Red Cross officials say 25 people were killed when Moslem mobs attacked Christians there.

The violence came to Onitsha Tuesday, apparently in reaction to the killings in Maiduguri and Bauchi, which like most of northern Nigeria, are dominated by Moslems. Onitsha, like most of the south, is dominated by Christians.

The cartoons, which first appeared in a Danish newspaper in September, have set off sometimes violent protests around the world. One caricature shows Moham-mad wearing a bomb-shaped
turban with an ignited fuse.

Islam widely holds that representations of Moham-mad are banned for fear they could lead to idolatry but it's OK to make representations of Osama bin Laden.

CFPA: The Muzis couldn't attack any Danes or Jews so they picked the Christians to attack. Unfortunately for the Muzis the Christians counter-attacked. To think that the Muzis started all of this mayhem over a couple of cartoons is insanity....insane followers of an insane prophet.

Posted: 23 Feb 2006