MAKURDI, Nigeria - Violence spread in central Nigeria on Wednesday after unidentified attackers launched fresh assaults on a village, two days after soldiers gunned down more than 200 people in the area.
At least 13 people were killed and three mosques set on fire in the region's main city of Makurdi after protests against the army crackdown degenerated into violence, residents said.
State authorities imposed a night curfew on Makurdi, the capital of Benue state, and on nearby Gboko, ordering police to shoot on sight anyone caught breaking the ban.
President Olusegun Obasanjo's government is struggling in the face of the worst cycle of ethnic or religious violence since the end of the late 1960s, when civil war erupted over breakaway Biafra.
Unrest in central Nigeria, the bread basket of Africa's most populous nation, follows a spate of Muslim-Christian riots in towns in the predominantly Muslim north, where hundreds of people have died in violence over the past two years.
Much of Wednesday's violence centred on villages in a farming district of Benue state where 19 soldiers were killed earlier this month. The soldiers were given an official funeral on Monday when Obasanjo pledged the army would hunt down their killers.
In one of these villages, Zaki-Biam, officials said the unidentified attackers began destroying buildings on Wednesday. The village was largely deserted since most of its people had fled following the violence earlier this week.
Rights groups protest London-based Amnesty International described the killings of villagers by soldiers earlier in the week as "an act of revenge" and "a killing spree." It said it went on for three days.
Amnesty urged "a prompt, effective and impartial inquiry" and noted that the army had denied any killings had taken place.
A Nigerian human rights activist, Felix Ofou, called on the government to say who had deployed troops in the area where the Tiv and Jukun ethnic groups have skirmished for years, largely over land: "On no account should soldiers overrun civilians in the guise of peacekeeping," Ofou told Reuters.
Abdul Oroh of the Civil Liberties Organisation compared the latest massacre to retaliatory killings in the southern village of Odi in November 1999, following the deaths of 12 policemen.
Benue state officials could not say whether those carrying out Wednesday's destruction of Zaki-Biam village were soldiers.
"They say people have visited Zaki-Biam again to do a total levelling," Shima Ayati, special adviser to the state governor of Benue, told Reuters.
"This morning they are there. They are destroying buildings now because the people all ran out of Zaki-Biam," he added.
Travellers reported heavy explosions from Zaki-Biam for much of the day. The village had been cordoned off.
The killings of the more than 200 people began on Monday in the community of Gbeji and spread to neighbouring Vaase, Anyiin and Zaki-Biam, near where the bodies of the 19 soldiers were found hacked to death on October 12, regional officials said.
A Gbegi witness said soldiers had gathered men in the main market square of his village and shot them.
Mayhem in Makurdi Some 140 km (90 miles) away, residents and travellers reported mayhem in the state capital Makurdi, a railway town and major thoroughfare for traffic between the north and south of the oil-producing West African country.
"There was pandemonium in the town. People fled their offices, shops and businesses closed and parents hurriedly removed their children from schools," a resident said.
Protesters ransacked Makurdi's city market of Wurukum, setting stalls ablaze, burning some of their owners alive, witnesses said.
"Three mosques were burned -- a big one in Wurukum area and two smaller ones in another part of town," a witness said.
"I am just coming from Wurukum now and I counted up to 12 burned bodies in the streets," another witness told Reuters.
A student demonstrator, believed to be the 13th victim, was killed in a machete attack, one of his colleagues said.