Nigeria's worst violence for 30 years subsided in the largely Christian east yesterday, but uncertainty still hung over the mainly Muslim north, where sectarian riots erupted last week.
Political commentators said they feared Muslims could react negatively to pressure which led northern leaders to suspend implementation of strict Islamic Sharia law, the cause of the crisis.
"It is a belated decision," northern politician Mr Kabiru Waya said of Monday's decision to halt any moves by some northern states to apply the Sharia penal code.
Mr Waya said from Kano, the biggest city in northern Nigeria, that he feared Muslim fanatics would see the decision, taken after crisis talks by the advisory National Council of State on Monday, as anti-Islamic.
"Just wait between now and Friday, the Muslim fanatics will want to avenge before peace is restored," he said. "Just watch out on or before Jumaat prayers on Friday."
Clashes between Christians and Muslims over plans to introduce Sharia law killed hundreds of people in the northern city of Kaduna last week, the worst violence the country has seen since the civil war of the late 1960s.
Opponents denounce Sharia law for prescribing amputation of hands for theft and death for adultery.
Many non-Muslim Nigerians also argue that Sharia violates Nigeria's constitutional status as a secular state.
Reprisal attacks on Muslims in Aba, a southeastern city in the heartland of the largely Christian Ibo, killed hundreds more people between Monday and Wednesday.
President Olusegun Obasanjo, facing his worst crisis since taking office last year to end 15 years of army rule, went on national television on Wednesday to denounce "the mindless killings and maimings".
He unveiled no new measures to deal with the crisis but lauded the decision of the Council of State as "a triumph of love of fatherland, triumph of maturity".
But the pro-Sharia lobby received weighty support the same day from former president Mr Shehu Shagari, who declared that only the courts of law had the power to halt implementation of the Sharia penal code in the north.
"It must be clearly understood that the Council of State is merely an advisory body which cannot take any decision that is legally binding on the state governments," Mr Shagari said in the northwestern city of Sokoto.
His argument was echoed yesterday by the Muslim Ummah (brotherhood) in Kano, a hotbed of sectarian unrest and one of the regional authorities about to adopt the penal code.
Any non-Muslim who felt uneasy with Sharia in a predominantly Islamic state "has the right to choose another state", it said in a statement, adding: "This is democracy!"
Mr Obasanjo, a southern Christian already accused by some northern politicians of bias since political power shifted from the north for the first time with his election last May, has tried to steer clear of the Sharia controversy.