11 children await trial over sect violence in Nigeria
AFP
KANO - Eleven children aged between five and 13 were being held at a juvenile jail in northern Nigeria Monday awaiting trial following sectarian clashes that left 70 people dead last month, police said.
"As far as we are concerned they are suspects and they will be arraigned before court of law when the on-going judicial strike ends," Bauchi police commissioner Atiku Kafur told AFP in a telephone interview.
A mud house burnt by members of Kala-Kato in Bauchi
The Red Cross said the children were part of 48 displaced when their homes were destroyed during the year-end violence.
Clashes erupted in Bauchi between suspected members of a radical Islamist sect known as Kala-Kato and security forces at the end of December.
At least 70 people were killed, many of them children and minors.
Houses, cars and motorcycles were burnt during the clashes.
The Kala-Kato sect rejects modernity, including Western-style education and medicine. It bans television and radio in its members' homes and rejects any literature except the Koran.
"We have 65 internally displaced persons from the December 29, 2009 sectarian unrest comprising 48 children whose fathers were killed in the violence and their 17 mothers," Adamu Abubakar, head of the Nigerian Red Cross in Bauchi told AFP.
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