Nigeria's Buhari urges calm after herdsmen kill 19 in central Plateau state
ABUJA (Reuters) - Nigeria’s President Muhammadu
Buhari appealed for calm and an end to communal violence on Saturday
after police said armed herdsmen killed 19 people in the central state
of Plateau.
Local police said Fulani herdsmen
attacked Ancha village, in the Bassa local government area of Plateau
state, in the early hours of Friday. They said it was thought to be a
reprisal attack after a boy from the herding community was killed.
Police provided details of the attack, in which five people were injured, late on Friday.
Fighting
between semi-nomadic cattle herders and more settled communities over
land use claims hundreds of lives a year in Nigeria’s central and
northern states.
“I urge all our communities
in the state and the other parts of the country to embrace peace and
bring to a stop these painful and unnecessary killings,” said Buhari, in
an emailed statement.
He said communities and
security agencies in Plateau had taken steps to “pull the state back
from the brink of anarchy and senseless killings”, adding that it would
be “a painful loss to allow these unsavory acts to return”.
The
violence is another security challenge for Buhari in addition to the
eight-year Boko Haram jihadist insurgency in the northeast and attempts
to maintain a fragile ceasefire in the southern Niger Delta energy hub
where militant attacks on oil facilities last year cut crude production
by more than a third.
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