Onitsha, Nigeria
Christian mobs last week killed scores of Muslims, burned their corpses, and defaced mosques as religious violence escalated in Nigeria. The riots started in the mostly Muslim north, when Muslims demonstrating against Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed attacked and killed about a dozen Christians. More than 30 churches were torched. Angry Christians in the south took revenge on the Muslim minority there, killing dozens of Muslims in the city of Onitsha alone. As hundreds of Muslim families fled, their homes and possessions were burned. Thousands of Nigerians have been killed in religious riots since 2000, when some of the northern Muslim states instituted strict Islamic law.
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