The number of people killed in riots sparked by an article on the Miss World beauty pageant has risen to 200, a civil rights group monitoring the unrest in this northern Nigerian city said this evening.
Mr Shehu Sani, director of the Civil Rights Congress (CRC), said that another 600 people had been injured in clashes with security forces and rioting between Muslim and Christian youths.
Mr Sani said the figure had been collated by a team of activists monitoring the fighting and recording evidence of rights abuses. He said 15 churches and 8 mosques had been burned to the ground in the clashes stretching from late Thursday until this morning.
The Red Cross refused to give a fresh casualty figure today, saying that it wanted to avoid provoking a further violent backlash, but its death toll for Thursday night's violence alone was 100, suggesting that the CRC figure is plausible.
Me Emmanuel Ijewere, president of the Nigerian Red Cross, said some 4,500 people have been driven from their homes in the fighting and that 320 were being treated in hospital.
"Obviously there have been deaths as well, but it would be irresponsible to put a figure on casualties. We don't want to increase tensions.
Witnesses said fighting continued overnight and as the sun rose this morning gunfire could be heard around the poor, religiously-mixed southern suburbs.
Miss World's organisers announced early this morning that they would quit Nigeria and seek to hold the December 7th ceremony, which was scheduled to take place in the Nigerian capital Abuja, in London instead.