Nigerian soldiers hunt Islamic sect members as women, children freed

MAIDUGURI, Wednesday

Nigerian soldiers and police carried out house to house searches in the northern city of Maiduguri on Wednesday for remaining members of an Islamic sect behind clashes which have killed more than 150 people.

Security forces in armoured personnel carriers on Tuesday surrounded and shelled parts of a compound believed to be home to Mohammed Yusuf, the leader of the radical Boko Haram sect, destroying buildings including a small mosque.

But the preacher's whereabouts were unknown.

"The soldiers and police are now combing the whole city of Maiduguri, going house to house searching for followers of the Boko Haram," Maiduguri resident Adamu Yari told Reuters.

"Hundreds of the members have been arrested," he said, adding that the sound of military bombardments from the area around the compound had continued throughout the night.

Yusuf's supporters -- armed with machetes, knives, home-made hunting rifles and petrol bombs -- have attacked churches, police stations, prisons and government buildings in parts of the mostly Muslim north in recent days.

The violence erupted when members of Boko Haram, which wants a wider adoption of Islamic sharia law across Africa's most populous nation, were arrested on Sunday in Bauchi state.

Unrest spread to the northern states of Kano, Yobe and Borno, whose capital Maiduguri is Yusuf's base.

President Umaru Yar'Adua, who has directed the security forces to take all necessary action to contain the sect members, on Tuesday met with security chiefs and the governors of the affected states, pledging a final operation to flush them out.

"These people have been organised and are penetrating our society and procuring arms and gathering information on how to make explosions and bombs to force their view on the rest of Nigerians," Yar'Adua said.

"We are going to continue with security surveillance all over the northern states and fish out any remnant of this group and deal with them promptly," he told reporters in Abuja.

Police in Maiduguri have said 90 of the rioters have been killed as well as eight police officers, three prison officials and two soldiers. More than 50 people were killed in Sunday's violence in Bauchi and several more have died in Kano and Yobe.

"Poverty and injustice"

More than 200 ethnic groups generally live peacefully side by side in Nigeria, a country of around 140 million people, although civil war left one million dead between 1967 and 1970 and there have been bouts of religious unrest since then.