mosque and Islamic school have been attacked and set alight in the southern Nigerian city of Benin, police say.

Police told the BBC that one person was killed, 10 arrested and that part of the mosque was still burning.

It follows a separate attack on a different mosque in the city on Monday.

In recent weeks, southerners, who are mostly Christians or animists, have been the targets of deadly attacks by the Islamist Boko Haram group, which operates in the mainly Muslim north.

A leader of the Hausa community in Benin told the BBC's Hausa Service that 7,000 northerners were seeking refuge in police and army barracks in the city.

The Nigerian Red Cross confirmed to the BBC that they were registering northerners at police stations and army barracks.


Two cars at the centre housing the mosque and Islamic school were also torched, police said.

The attack is the latest in a spiral of sectarian violence that has seen many southerners living in the north flee their homes.

The BBC's Naziru Mikailu in Abuja, Nigeria's capital, said the latest violence started in Benin on Monday when a group attacked a mosque, leaving 10 people injured.

Then, in Gusau, capital of northern Zamfara state, youths attacked a church. Police made 19 arrests, our reporter says.

Back in Benin on Tuesday, a mosque and Islamic centre were attacked and set alight in a different area from Monday's attack.

A group of youths tried to attack a Hausa community leader's house but it was defended by Hausa youths and the police then intervened, our reporter says.

Nigerian writer and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka blamed the violence of recent months on leaders who put their own religion above national unity.

"When you get a situation where a bunch of people can go into a place of worship and open fire through the windows, you've reached a certain dismal watershed in the life of that nation," he said in a BBC interview.

"There's no question at all, whatsoever. Those who have created this faceless army have lost control of that army."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-16492504

I bet the Presido is so confused now.

Nigeria on the brink !

LAGOS/KANO, Jan 10 (Reuters) - A mob killed five people in an attack on a mosque in southern Nigeria on Tuesday, as swelling numbers took to the streets in a second day of nationwide protests against the scrapping of a fuel subsidy that has nearly doubled petrol prices.

An aid worker whose organisation operates in the area, who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject, said the attack on a mosque in Benin City had forced 3,000 Muslims of northern origin to flee.

The assault was most likely a reprisal against northern Muslims for attacks by the radical Islamist sect Boko Haram on Christians of southern origin in the north, including a spate of deadly raids on churches which have killed dozens.

The Benin attack raised fears that President Goodluck Jonathan's two biggest security headaches - opposition to fuel deregulation and sectarian strife - were merging into one.

Boko Haram's increasingly violent northern-based insurgency is straining relations between Nigeria's largely Christian south and its mostly Muslim north. That has stretched security forces now also occupied with containing fuel protests.

The police said suspected members of Boko Haram on Monday evening assassinated a member of the state security service and shot dead two other people, in separate incidents.

When subsidies on imports of motor fuel were scrapped on Jan 1., many citizens saw what they regard as their only welfare benefit disappear and the price of petrol more than doubled to 150 naira ($0.93) a litre.

Tens of thousands demonstrated in cities across the country of 160 million. Tuesday's protests were bigger than Monday's in Lagos, Nigeria's largest city, and in the capital Abuja and were as big as Monday's in other major cities.

TEST OF JONATHAN'S RESOLVE

Jonathan has shown no sign of weakening in the face of protests similar to those that have derailed past attempts to scrap the fuel subsidy.

"The strike is the first true test in policy terms of the Jonathan presidency. They chose the issue and the timing," said Antony Goldman, Nigeria specialist and head of London-based PM Consulting.

"If they prevail, the prospects for reform in other delicate areas - the constitution, oil and gas, revenue - all improve. If the strikers prevail, the administration's credibility is massively damaged. If oil exports are not hit, the government will hope the thing just peters out."

In Rivers state, in the oil-rich Niger Delta, the local government said it would cap the price of fuel in the state at 137 naira per litre. Although this is more than double the subsidised price it is the first sign of local government compromising on the free market message pushed by Jonathan.

Thousands gathered outside the labour union headquarters in Lagos and marched to the marina that runs along its wide lagoon. The roads of the normally heaving commercial hub, notorious for its traffic jams, were largely empty.

Oil workers were also on strike and the offices of international companies such as Shell and Exxon Mobil were shut. But Shell and the state oil company said output was unaffected.

A group of youths set up a road block of burning tyres on the main bridge over the lagoon connecting Lagos's two islands to the mainland, shouting at cars to turn back. "The betrayers in government must free us from slavery," one placard read.

Police fired live rounds into the air to disperse a crowd in the middle-class suburb of Lekki.

On Monday police shot dead two people in the northern city of Kano who were helping pull down the walls around Government House, the seat of the state governor, according to witnesses and hospital staff. Police said one person was killed.

Police spokesman Yemi Ajayi said a policeman who shot dead a protester in Lagos on Monday had been arrested and an investigation launched into the incident.

Some independent market stalls and shops were open in many cities but banks, government offices and large company buildings remained closed. Some flights into Nigeria were cancelled.

But a spokesman for Shell Nigeria said there was "no impact on (oil) production at this time".

Much of Nigeria's oil comes from offshore fields that rely on small numbers of staff and heavily automated equipment.

"UNBEARABLE WEIGHT"

"If we have to starve to make the president reverse his decision, I will do it," said Musa Abdullahi, a 43-year-old iron worker in Kano.

"This strike is about every Nigerian and the future of our nation. Every government has told us that more money on petrol will better our lives in the long term, but nothing changes."

Literary idol Chinua Achebe and several other writers lent their support. Achebe said removing subsidies placed "an unbearable economic weight on their (Nigerians') lives".

Seun and Femi Kuti, musicians and sons of the late Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti, led one of the biggest rallies in Lagos, gaining vocal support from adoring fans in the crowd.

But economists say the subsidy is wasteful and corrupt, sending billions of dollars intended for the poor to a cartel of petrol importers, and encouraging smuggling into neighbouring Benin and Cameroon, where fuel is more expensive.

The government estimates it will save 1 trillion naira ($6 billion) this year by eliminating the subsidy.

Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said 90 billion naira a year of the saved money would go on roads and infrastructure, 57 billion on the railways and 60 billion on poverty safety nets.

Pro-government adverts reading "Nigerians, let us remember that this is the first administration that has delivered on most of its promises" were on the front page of several newspapers.

Jonathan has also pledged to cut the salaries of his administration by 25 percent.

To most Nigerians, such gestures and promises feel tired and empty. Though many politicians have grown rich from a sector that exports $200 million of oil a day, decades of corruption have left power and transport networks, education and healthcare badly neglected and dilapidated.