Violence between Christians and Muslims over the last three years has left more than 53,000 people dead in a central Nigerian state, officials said Thursday. It was the first official death toll from sectarian violence in the region.
A government-appointed committee said 53,787 people had died in Plateau state between September 2001 and May 2004, when the government declared a state of emergency there after a massacre left hundreds dead in the town of Yelwa.
The tallies were based on figures gathered from family members who said they lost relatives, said Thomas Kagnaan, chairman of the Committee on Rehabilitation and Reconciliation of Internally Displaced People.
Among the dead were 17,459 children, 17,397 women and 18,931 men, according to a summary of the report released Thursday. Some 281,164 people were displaced during the violence, with 25,129 houses and 1,326 cattle destroyed.
Plateau state has been riven by ethnic and religious fighting since skirmishes erupted in September 2001 in the previously tranquil capital city of Jos that left more than 1,000 people killed.
Previously, it was widely believed at least 10,000 people had died in intertwined ethnic, religious and communal violence in Africa's most populous country since President Olusegun Obasanjo's 1999 election ended more than 15 years of military rule.
Nigeria, a nation of more than 126 million people, is made up of a majority-Muslim north and a heavily Christian south and is frequently rocked by sectarian violence.