Dr Chris Ngige - www.ngige.com: 200 Killed in Jos Villages Raid

Jos/Abuja - At least 200 people were killed yesterday when suspected pastoralists attacked three villages near Jos, where sectarian violence left hundreds dead in January, villagers and officials said.

Witnesses said armed persons stormed the Berom villages of Dogo Nahawa, Ramsat and Kamang, in Shen district of Jos South Local Government Area, at about 3.00 am, shooting in the air, thereby creating pandemonium as villagers scamper for cover. People who came out of their homes were bludgeoned or macheted to death.

The villages are 10 kilometres south of Jos city, and about five minutes' drive to the country home of Governor Jonah Jang.

Our reporter saw corpses-- including those of women and children - with cudgel and machete wounds strewn along the streets. Many houses in the villages were also razed.

Witnesses said they were suspecting the invaders to be Fulani pastoralists because they were heard speaking in Fulfulde as they attack the villagers.

Dogo Nahawa resident Peter Gyang said he hid at an uncompleted building and saw the invaders chanting incomprehensible codes at their would-be attackers before killing them.

"They came around 3 o'clock in the morning and they started shooting into the air," Reuters news agency quoted Gyang as saying. "The shooting was just meant to bring people from their houses and then when people came out they started cutting them with machetes."

An elderly man David Kyang told NAN news agency: "They came and attacked us when everyone slept; they first set the houses ablaze and shot sporadically into the air to scare the able-bodied men away."

Military units began surrounding the affected villages around the same time journalists and officials visited the areas, reports said. "It appears to be reprisal attacks," Red Cross spokesman Robin Waubo told AP news agency, referring to the massacre of Fulani people in other villages of the state in January.

In nearby Bauchi state, more than 600 people fled to a makeshift camp still holding victims of January's violence, said Red Cross official Adamu Abubakar. "They started running away from the fighting," Abubakar told AP news agency

State Commissioner of Information Gregroy Yenlong said up to 500 people were killed and many others were being treated at various hospitals in the state.

"It is nothing but ethnic cleansing," Yenlong told newsmen shortly after visiting the attacked villages. He said all the three villages attacked were Berom villages, making the state government to suspect that it was aimed at a particular ethnic group. He said preliminary reports on the attack indicate that the attackers were Fulani. He said government suspect former state secretary of the PDP Saleh Bayeri of having foreknowledge of the attack because he had been making statements inciting the Fulani people against the Beroms.

But Bayeri denied this, adding that since the attack on the Fulani in Kim Kim and Kuru Karama in January, he had been appealing to his people to be calm. He wondered why the state government was swift to point at a suspect over the latest killings when it failed to name a single person when the Fulani were killed in January.

Secretary of Fulani organisation Miyetti Allah in the state, Mohammed Nuru Abdullahi, said his members had no hand in the attacks and only heard about them on the radio.

Police spokesman Mohammed Lerama confirmed the attacks but said he could not gives figures of the dead until the end of investigations.

Gbong Gwom Jos, Da Jacob Gyang Buba, who visited the areas affected, said the situation was "sad, heinous, unacceptable and man's inhumanity to man."

Director of the League of Human Rights in Jos, Shamaki Gad, condemned the attack saying the killing of women and children was despicable.

In Abuja, deputy force public relations officer Yemi Ajayi said normalcy had returned to the villages. "The Commissioner of Police in the State had informed the Police Headquarters about the crisis and said it has been contained. It was prevented from spreading," he said.

Story by: Andrew Agbese, Ahmed Mohammed and Misbahu Bashir