Death toll in religious clashes rises to 400

Residents delivered more bodies to the main mosque in the central Nigerian city of Jos yesterday, bringing the death toll from two days of clashes between Muslim and Christian gangs to around 400 people.

Rival ethnic and religious mobs have burned homes, shops, mosques and churches in fighting triggered by a disputed local election in a city at the crossroads of Nigeria's Muslim north and Christian south. It is the country's worst unrest for years.

Murtala Sani Hashim, who has been registering the dead as they are brought to the city's main mosque, said he had listed 367 bodies and more were arriving. Ten corpses wrapped in blankets, two of them infants, lay behind him.