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Nigeria's acting president on Sunday ordered the security forces to hunt down those behind clashes involving Muslim herders and Christian villagers in which more than 300 people may have been killed.The latest unrest in Nigeria's central Plateau state comes at a difficult time, with acting leader Goodluck Jonathan trying to assert his authority while ailing President Umaru Yar'Adua remains too sick to govern the oil-producing nation.
Villagers in Dogo Nahawa, just south of the state capital Jos, said Hausa-Fulani herders from surrounding hills attacked at about 3 a.m. (0200 GMT), shooting into the air before cutting those who came out of their homes with machetes.
A Red Cross official said at least two other nearby communities were also targetted, in an area close to where sectarian clashes killed hundreds of people in January, but that it was too early to give an overall death toll.
A Reuters witness counted more than 120 bodies -- most lying in Dogo Nahawa, others taken to mortuaries in Jos -- but Plateau State Commissioner for Information Gregory Yenlong said more than 300 people, including women and children, had died.
Jonathan put the security forces on red alert to try to prevent reprisal attacks spreading into neighbouring states.
"Reports reaching us indicated marauding bands launched a flurry of attacks on certain communities in the state, causing considerable death and injury," Jonathan's office said.
"The Acting President ... has directed that the security services undertake strategic initiatives to confront and defeat these roving bands of killers," it said in a statement.
Some of the bodies seen by the Reuters witness -- including those of women and children -- were charred, others had machete wounds across their faces. Aid workers said some had been shot.
"The shooting was just meant to bring people from their houses and then when people came out they started cutting them with machetes," said Dogo Nahawa resident Peter Jang, women crying behind him.
Four days of sectarian clashes in January between mobs armed with guns, knives and machetes killed hundreds of people in Jos, which lies at the crossroads of Nigeria's Muslim north and predominantly Christian south.
