Mobs formed across the Nigerian city of Jos Wednesday morning, an AFP reporter saw, appearing to lead to the deaths of two people, with others wounded by gunshots in the ensuing mayhem.
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With violence threatening to spill across the city, the University of Jos ordered the “evacuation” of its student housing over the course of Wednesday and Thursday, saying that the state government was providing transport.
Jos, the capital of Plateau state in north-central Nigeria, is home to a mixed population of Christians and Muslims, many of whom live peacefully side by side.
But the city is also riven with ethnic and religious tension that has sparked deadly sectarian riots in the past.
It’s unclear who formed the mobs or who they were targeting.
Sani Danladi Marshall, a used car dealer, was at his house which doubles as his business premise, when he saw a group of youths appearing from different directions. They stopped a commuter taxi and pulled out two passengers.
“They hit one of them with stones, they hit him again till he died. They pushed his dead body into a ditch,” he told AFP. The second person escaped.
Another resident, Usman Musa, 31, told AFP at the Ghambazi hospital, he was shot by unknown assailants.
“I was rushed to hospital and having regained my consciousness, I saw my other colleagues in the same condition,” he said.
It was unclear if he and his colleague, Jibril Nasir, were targeted intentionally or hit by stray bullets amid the wider chaos.
“I don’t know who shot at us,” said Nasir, 28, who works with Musa in the tin mining sector.
Earlier in the day, an AFP reporter in Jos saw a crowd of people form and smash cars, a “keke” tricycle taxi set ablaze, and crowds running for safety. Elsewhere, the reporter saw two bodies in the street.
Streets were largely deserted Wednesday afternoon as security forces including the military deployed around the city.
That morning they had at times shot into the air to disperse crowds.
– Toll unknown –
The Red Cross did not respond to a request seeking Wednesday’s death toll, though an AFP reporter saw victims being transported in its vehicles.
The military has not commented on Wednesday’s unrest, though the Nigerian army reposted a video on X of its troops helping two elderly women “stranded” in a Jos neighbourhood, helping them into a vehicle.
In the Plateau state countryside, farmers and herders regularly clash over access to land, though the conflict falls across ethnic and religious lines, adding fuel to the fire in a state where ethnicity, religion and who is considered “indigenous” can be politically explosive topics.
A general curfew placed over the city for Monday and Tuesday was thought to have reduced the chance of further attacks — including reprisals — following the Sunday shooting.
Sunday’s massacre occurred in Anguwan Rukuba, a neighbourhood popular with local university students and staff.
Though most of the victims of the shooting are presumed to be Christian, a local Muslim group said that four of its members were killed in the violence.