Maiduguri: Police on Saturday said they had arrested dozens of members of an Islamist sect and freed hundreds of civilians kidnapped by the group, after security forces crushed its violent uprising.
Authorities, meanwhile, cleared rotting corpses from the streets of this northern Nigerian city where attacks by extremists and fierce gun battles with police killed more than 600 people this week.
Police today said that they had arrested 36 suspected members of the sect, including two from neighbouring Niger, on Thursday. The Saturday Punch newspaper published a picture of the suspects, most of whom appeared to be very young men.
Police also said they had rescued 230 young women and children kidnapped from several northern states and brought to the northeastern city of Maiduguri during the uprising.
One girl among them, Maimunatu Shuraim, 15, said that the sect members herded them into waiting buses telling them they would learn "pure Islamic theology" in Maiduguri.
The group is opposed to western-style education which it says is corrupting young people.
The 36 suspects were arrested as they headed west for Lagos, the economic capital, from the capital Abuja, according to a statement by Abuja police chief Haruna John read out to reporters yesterday by his spokesman, Jimoh Moshood.
Bureau Report
