Sectarian violence in Jos

JOS, Nigeria (Reuters) - Clashes between Islamic pastoralists and Christian villagers killed more than 100 people near the central Nigerian city of Jos Sunday, where sectarian violence left hundreds dead in January, witnesses said.

The latest unrest in volatile central Nigeria comes at a difficult time, with acting President Goodluck Jonathan trying to assert his authority and the oil producing country's ailing leader Umaru Yar'Adua too sick to govern.

Villagers in Dogo Nahawa, just south of Jos, said Hausa-Fulani pastoralists from the surrounding hills attacked at about 3 a.m. (9 p.m. EST), shooting into the air before slashing those who came out of their homes with machetes.

"The shooting was just meant to bring people from their houses and then when people came out they started cutting them with machetes," said Dogo Nahawa resident Peter Jang, women crying behind him.

A Reuters witness who visited the village counted around 100 bodies piled in the open air. Pam Dantong, medical director of Plateau State Hospital in Jos, showed reporters 18 corpses that had been brought from the village, some of them charred.

Officials said other bodies had been taken to a second hospital in the state capital.

Gregory Yenlong, spokesman for Plateau State Governor Jonah Jang, said as many as 500 people may have been killed but there was no independent confirmation of this.

Four days of sectarian clashes in January between mobs armed with guns, knives and machetes killed hundreds of people in Jos, the capital of Plateau state, which lies at the crossroads of Nigeria's Muslim north and predominantly Christian south.

Jonathan deployed hundreds of troops and police to quell January's unrest, in which community leaders put the death toll at more than 400. Official police figures estimated the death toll from the clashes two months ago at 326.

Yenlong said the state government may consider extending a dusk-to-dawn curfew still in place after January's unrest.

POLITICAL UNCERTAINTY

It was not immediately clear what triggered the latest unrest, but thousands have died in religious and ethnic violence in central Nigeria over the past 10 years.

"This is an act of inhumanity," said Da Buba Gyang, the traditional ruler of the Christian Berom ethnic group in Jos.

The tension is rooted in decades of resentment between indigenous groups, mostly Christian or animist, who are vying for control of fertile farmlands with migrants and settlers from the Hausa-speaking Muslim north.

The instability underscores the fragility of Africa's most populous nation as it approaches the campaign period for 2011 elections with uncertainty over who is in charge.

Yar'Adua returned from three months in a Saudi hospital, where he was being treated for a heart condition, a week and a half ago but has still not been seen in public. Presidency sources say he remains in a mobile intensive care unit.

Fears of a debilitating power struggle between Yar'Adua's inner circle, keen to maintain its grip on power, and Jonathan sprang up in the OPEC member state of 140 million people when the 58-year-old leader was brought back late at night.

Jonathan has moved quickly to reassert his authority, chairing his first cabinet meeting since Yar'Adua's return.