In the neighboring town of Kafanchan, clashes between Muslim and Christian youth continued unabated throughout the night of April 18. Christian and Muslims leaders told Human Rights Watch that by the next morning at least 20 Christians and 34 Muslims had been killed. The mobs torched hundreds of homes, shops, and vehicles, and razed to the ground the central market. Twenty-six mosques and four churches were burned or destroyed. One of the leaders from the Igbo ethnic group, the vast majority Christians from southeastern Nigeria, told Human Rights Watch that 11 Igbo residents were killed in Kafanchan, while 224 of their houses and 837 shops, many of them in the central market, were burned.
Failure to Break the Cycle of Violence
More than 15,700 people have been killed in inter-communal, political, and sectarian violence since Nigeria returned to civilian rule in 1999. In Kaduna State, at least 2,000 people were killed in sectarian clashes in 2000 sparked by Christian protests against the proposed introduction of Sharia law in the state. Two years later, sectarian violence sparked by Muslim protests linked to the Miss World beauty contest left some 250 people dead.

The human cost of such violence has been particularly high in neighboring Plateau State, where Human Rights Watch estimates that more than 3,800 people have been killed in inter-communal and sectarian clashes since 2001, at least 1,000 of them in 2010 alone.

Human Rights Watch has found that state and local government policies that discriminate against members of ethnic groups classified as "non-indigenes" - those who cannot trace their ancestry to what are said to be the original inhabitants of an area - have exacerbated existing inter-communal tensions in Nigeria. These discriminatory government policies have effectively relegated millions of residents to permanent second-class status.

Despite repeated outbreaks of inter-communal violence, federal and state government authorities, under the ruling party's control since 1999, have done little to address the root causes of the violence. The Nigerian authorities have failed to break the cycle of killings by holding accountable those responsible.

In southern Kaduna State, a civil servant told Human Rights Watch that he recognized some of the individuals who he saw kill his neighbors. But when he went to the police to file a report, the senior police officer at the station told him that "if the police started arresting people now, it would cause more problems." Instead the police advised the man to wait until a commission of inquiry is set up to investigate the violence.

Over the years, the federal and state governments have set up various committees and commissions of inquiry to investigate outbreaks of violence, but the reports from these bodies, and the occasional government white paper, have mostly been shelved. In the absence of accountability and effective redress, communities that have suffered violence frequently resort to vigilante justice and exact revenge by inflicting commensurate harm on members of other communities.

"Panels of inquiry have become a tunnel through which the government runs away from their responsibility to bring the culprits of violence to book," said Innocent Chukwuma, executive director of CLEEN Foundation, a civil society group that works on justice sector reform. "Going to these panels buys the government time and when the problem drops from the headlines they go back to business as usual."

Witness Accounts
A lecturer at the Nuhu Bamalli Polytechnic, a college on the outskirts of the city of Zaria in northern Kaduna State, described to Human Rights Watch how a mob of Muslim youth attacked and killed four Christian students and a Christian lecturer on April 17:

Between 10 a.m. and 12 p.m. they entered the school chanting slogans and shouting: "Where are the Christians that supported the ruling party?" When you see the mob, they were not in their senses. They had painted their faces black and were shouting that they needed "change" [the Congress for Progressive Change campaign slogan]. The mob had all sorts of weapons - machetes, sticks, and clubs. They started breaking the glass [windows] on the buildings. The students ran away but the mob pursued them into the staff quarters and they had nowhere to go. The mob beat them to death and hit them with machetes. Four Christian students and a Christian lecturer were killed. The lecturer was Yoruba. Three of the students and the lecturer died on the spot; the other student died at St. Luke's Anglican Hospital. About 200 students - both Christians and Muslims - were injured; eight students are still in the hospital. I helped take the dead and injured to the hospital. The mobs also burned four of the staff houses. They said the lecturers had given money to the ruling party.

Between 12 and 1 p.m. the military arrived and started shooting in the air and the mob scattered. They arrested one person. The military gathered the students to the main football field and kept guard. There were several thousand students. They all slept that night on the football field.

In the small town of Matsirga in southern Kaduna State, Muslim leaders told Human Rights Watch that 39 Muslims were killed. A middle-aged man who lives in the town described to Human Rights Watch what he saw on the night of April 18:
Around 8 p.m. after Isha'a prayers we were sitting around our mosque eating with our neighbors. One of my sons told me that people had made a roadblock on the road entering our town. I called one of the Bajju [ethnic group] leaders [name withheld] and he told me this trouble is from Kaduna and he can't do anything. He said I should pack my family and go hide. But they had blocked the road so we couldn't leave. I stood by the gate with my family. Around 10 p.m. I was told that the Bajju youth had set fire to one of the houses. I saw the fire in the distance. Some time past 10 p.m., a group of Bajju youth came and set fire to my neighbor's house. They were large in number. Some had sticks, machetes, and catapults. I recognized one of them. I called out to him, "What is going on?" He said, "Today you will face the music." Another Bajju youth had a double barrel gun. My neighbor Yahaya pleaded with him saying, "Why are you doing this?" But he shot Yahaya at close range. He was gasping for breath and died. I ran to my house and told my family to run. I climbed a mango tree by my house. I saw the Bajju come and set fire to my house. I saw them burn my house, my car, my neighbor's house, and the neighborhood mosque.

Around 3 a.m., after all the houses were burned, I climbed down from the tree and crawled on the ground until our burial ground. I then ran to the river about two kilometers away. I hid in the water for about an hour. When it started getting light, I crawled out of the river and climbed a nearby mountain and hid. I saw the Bajju people looking for us. I saw them kill three people by the river with machetes and an axe. I could see them but they couldn't see me....

I later went back to my house with the police and army. One of my sons was killed, but my wives and other children survived. One of his [my son's] friends told me he saw the Bajju youth cutting him with machetes. They didn't kill women; they only killed men and boys. Some of the corpses we saw were burned. We couldn't identify them. Everything was burned to ashes, all of my documents, everything was burned to ashes. We have no other place than here. I was born in Matsirga.

Human Rights Watch interviewed two witnesses who described how a police officer shot and killed Suliman Adamu inside a house in the Tudun Wada neighborhood of Kaduna city on the morning of April 18. A construction worker described what he saw:
Around 8:30 p.m. on Sunday night [April 17], the day after the elections, people started burning tires [in the streets]. The police came and started shooting and we ran away. On Monday morning, around 8:30 to 9 a.m., some people started coming out and burning tires again. The police returned and pursued one of the people into Suli's [Suliman's] compound. Two policemen entered the compound. One was in mufti [civilian dress], he had a red Manchester jersey, and was wearing a helmet. The other police officer was wearing a black police uniform with a helmet. I saw one shoot his gun through the window. I heard Suliman yell. The policeman then shot again through the door. I heard the other policeman ask him why he shot him inside his house. He answered, "If I shoot him, I can't miss; I can't waste my ammunition for nothing." The policemen then left. Before we could take him to the hospital he was dead.


https://www.hrw.org/news/2011/05/16/nigeria-post-election-violence-killed-800

Electoral violence is an outlet for long held grudges. These communities probably had problems long before this. I could be wrong though.

saladinnoir:
Electoral violence is an outlet for long held grudges. These communities probably had problems long before this. I could be wrong though.

I think you're right

It just got to me that Buhari created a special fund to compensate them . Don't know if it's true