Troops stamp authority on Lagos

A soldier interrogates a woman in the Idi Araba neighborhood of Lagos

LAGOS, Nigeria -- Heavily armed troops have restored an uneasy calm in Lagos after four days of ethnic violence which left about 100 people dead.

The Nigerian Red Cross said 100 people had died in the riots, many of whom had been hacked to death or left burning on the roadside, with a further 430 residents wounded.

About 100 heavily armed members of Nigeria's army arrived in Lagos on Tuesday afternoon, as a senior military officer tried to persuade residents to return home.

Soldiers ordered residents of the northern suburbs of Mushin and Idi Araba -- where fighting between Yoruba and Hausa tribal militants began on Saturday -- to walk through the battle-torn streets with their hands above their head as a precaution.

Some people were ordered to lie on the ground while soldiers searched them for weapons.

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Soldiers kicked down the doors to people's homes and suspects were interrogated kneeling on the ground at gunpoint.

Anyone trying to escape were shot dead, witnesses said.

Lagos State Police Commissioner Mike Okiro told Reuters on Tuesday: "Ten miscreants are being held and they will appear in court."

Authorities, who have been criticised for failing to quell the disturbances earlier, were not taking any further chances and ordered schools throughout the city to close and asked parents to keep their children at home.

Residents were still fleeing the area, saying they were afraid the security forces would soon leave.

Others, however, were nervously venturing back to collect whatever belongings were left in their looted, burnt homes.

Hundreds of people -- mostly Hausa women, children and elderly men -- had sought refuge at the Abalti army barracks, near Idi Araba, and the Ikeja police college, farther away.

The ethnic Yoruba governor of Lagos state appeared on national television alongside Hausa governors of several northern states to appeal to fighters in their respective languages to lay down their weapons.

"We are one nation, one people, under one God," Governor Bola Tinubu said.

There are long-standing hostilities between the mainly Muslim Hausas from the north of the country and the Yorubas, most of whom are Christians from the southwest. Koinange reported that many Lagos residents welcomed the military presence, despite strained relations after the January 27 army munitions plant explosion that left at least 1,000 dead.

He said the army was perceived as able to restore order rather than the police who last week abandoned their posts in a dispute over pay and working conditions.

Koinange said that in the mainly Hausa Muslim north there are Christian enclaves and there were fears of retaliatory attacks there for what had happened in Lagos.

Five trucks of soldiers were stationed at key positions in the highly volatile mostly Muslim city of Kano, where hundreds died last year in ethnic rioting.

Police said they had also reinforced Jigawa state, which borders Kano.

"We've been going to the villages telling people they should not see the clashes in Lagos as an attack on Hausas by any particular tribe, but the activities of hoodlums," said the police chief in Jigawa State, Shehu Adedayo Adeoye.

The violence started on Saturday after Hausas claimed a young Yoruba man desecrated a mosque.

Hausas apparently turned on him and beat him to death. Yorubas saw this and retaliated.

Authorities have raised suspicions that the riots might have been engineered, Reuters reported.

Lagos State Information Commissioner Dele Alake told the news agency: "Obviously when you look at the sequence of events you don't have to be a sleuth to know that it appears to be a programme."