KADUNA, Nigeria (Reuters) - Rampaging youths looted shops and lit bonfires in the northern Nigerian city of Kaduna as Muslim anger over the country's staging of the Miss World pageant spread on Thursday, witnesses said.
Armed police fought street battles with rioters, firing volleys of teargas as unrest spilled into the central district of the city where thousands died in sectarian riots in 2000. No deaths have been reported so far this time.
"The protesters made bonfires on major highways. They broke into shops and destroyed more than 15 vehicles in Tudun Wada area," a resident told Reuters by telephone.
A worker at a newspaper office in the city said: "The fundamentalists burned two hotels. They then attempted to burn our office, and we had to jump the fence of the building to hide in the house of a Muslim neighbor."
Rioting flared on Wednesday, initially over a newspaper report linking the name of the Prophet Mohammad to the pageant. But it quickly turned into a general protest against the December 7 event in the nearby national capital, Abuja.
Irate youths armed with stones and clubs on Wednesday burned the Kaduna office of This Day, a leading independent daily which carried a report on Saturday that triggered the unrest.
The story on Muslim protests over the staging of the pageant in Nigeria included a line that said the Prophet Mohammad would have married one of the beauty queens.
The paper on Thursday ran a front-page apology, the third since publication of the story, which it said went out in error. But this has not appeased Muslim groups in the largely Islamic north of the country who have decreed a ban on the daily.
The disturbances in Kaduna have added to raging controversy over Nigeria's staging of its biggest show business event ever.
Many beauty queens had threatened boycott the pageant in Abuja to protest the sentencing of Muslim women in northern Nigeria to death by stoning for adultery.
Following assurances by the government that no one would be stoned, some 90 contestants arrived in Nigeria last week, with many voicing support for the condemned women.
Islamists terming the pageant "a parade of nudity" had vowed to disrupt the event. President Olusegun Obasanjo last week canceled a scheduled meeting with the beauty queens for fear of offending Muslims, pageant organizers said.