KADUNA, Nigeria (Reuters) - At least 105 people have been killed in riots in Nigeria stoked by Muslim fury over the country's staging of the Miss World contest next month, Red Cross officials said on Friday.
More than 500 people have also been injured in the street riots in the northern city of Kaduna, where enraged youths have torched churches and mosques.
The violence, sparked by a newspaper article suggesting the Prophet Mohammad would probably have married one of the Miss World beauty queens, resembled massive sectarian bloodletting in the region two years ago that killed thousands.
The bloody mayhem then stemmed from non-Muslim opposition to plans to introduce Islamic sharia law in Kaduna state in the predominantly Muslim north, but this time Muslim fury has been touched off by the Miss World pageant set for December 7.
Nigeria won the right to stage the contest after Nigerian Agbani Darego won the last event in South Africa.
Residents of Kaduna, a city scarred by burned out buildings and with overturned cars littering its streets, said sporadic shooting could be heard on Friday morning as soldiers and police battled rioters despite a 24-hour curfew.
Kaduna residents said Muslims were accusing authorities of trying to bar them from Friday prayers with the curfew.
"The 105 are identifiable deaths," Nigerian Red Cross president Emmanuel Ijewere told Reuters by phone from the capital Abuja, adding that the tally came from his field officers in Kaduna.
He suggested the toll could rise further, saying: "There are some houses that have not been entered. It is possible that there are injured in these houses."
Red Cross spokesman Patrick Bawa said 521 injured people had been evacuated to Kaduna hospitals by Thursday night.
The riots erupted on Wednesday when rampaging Muslim youths burned the Kaduna offices of the independent Lagos-based daily This Day, whose November 16 article sparked the violence.
The unrest quickly turned into a general protest against Miss World contest, to be held in Abuja.
RESIDENTS DEFY CURFEW
After the shooting on Friday morning in Kaduna, the streets of the city of four million people were teeming by midday. Residents said they were defying the curfew in anger at the local governor.
"People are angry because the governor refused to receive a group of protesters who came yesterday to deliver a petition against the newspaper article," one resident said.
"Instead security forces fired teargas and opened fire, killing five people right there at the gate of government house," said the resident, asking not to be named.
Witnesses said angry youths tore down the re-election campaign posters of Governor Ahmed Makarfi, a political ally of President Olusegun Obasanjo.
"Muslims are angry about the curfew. They believe the governor is trying to prevent them going to the Mosque today," another resident said. Friday prayers are often a flashpoint of unrest in the volatile region.
Soldiers and police have been put on the alert in northern Nigeria's biggest city of Kano, just north of Kaduna. Relations between the Muslim majority and a significant and assertive Christian minority in Kaduna state have always been tense.
BEAUTY QUEENS CONFINED TO HOTEL
More than 90 Miss World contestants, who arrived in Nigeria on November 10 despite raging controversy around this year's pageant, were confined to their hotel in Abuja on Friday.
Pageant organizers have insisted the event will go ahead.
The Miss World contest, which Nigerian officials hope will showcase the country and add to its tourist appeal, initially ran into trouble amid worldwide publicity over Amina Lawal, a 31-year-old woman who was sentenced under Islamic law to death by stoning for bearing a child out of wedlock.
Following assurances by the government that no one would be stoned, some 90 contestants arrived in Nigeria last week, with many voicing support for Lawal and other women sentenced to death by courts enforcing Islamic sharia law.
Obasanjo's government has appealed for calm, and said that anyone found fomenting disorder would be decisively dealt with.
This Day newspaper ran its third apology for its controversial report on Thursday's front page since it first published the story. It said the article went out in error.