By Aminu Abubakar (AFP)
KANO, Nigeria - At least 39 people were killed in northern Nigeria Sunday in clashes between police and members of a radical Islamic sect inspired by the Taliban of Afghanistan, police said.
The authorities' death toll conflicted with an earlier statement from a hospital official who reported receiving 42 bodies at the facility in the city of Bauchi where the violence took place.
"As far as we are concerned, 39 people have been killed in this violence, including one soldier, while two policemen and 15 members of the Taliban were injured," said Bauchi police spokesman Mohammed Barau, referring to the sect founded in Nigeria in 2004 with a mission to set up a strict Islamic state.
"We have made 176 arrests," he added.
The two sides had exchanged gunfire after a failed dawn attack on a police station in the neighbourhood of Dutsen Tenshin.
"Our men succeeded in repelling the dawn attack by the Taliban and killed five members of the group in the exchange of gunfire," Barau had told AFP earlier, adding that a manhunt was on for other Taliban members who fled the scene.
In the wake of the violence, the governor of Bauchi state has declared a curfew for overnight and possibly longer.
"The curfew will be in place for as long as it requires to restore lasting peace in this city," said Isa Yuguda.
"What happened was quite unfortunate and if not for effective intelligence gathered, the situation would have been worse," he said.
Awwal Isa, a nurse at Bauchi Specialist Hospital, told AFP that initially, the hospital received nine bodies, followed by another 33. He added that one of the dead was a soldier, the rest were members of the Taliban sect.
According to the hospital figures the death toll would amount to the biggest number of casualties the Taliban sect has suffered in clashes with Nigerian authorities.
The Nigerian Taliban debuted in 2004 when it set up a base -- dubbed Afghanistan -- in Kanamma village in northern Yobe state, on the border with Niger, from where it attacked police outposts and killed police officers.
Its membership is mainly drawn from university dropouts.
The north of Nigeria is majority Muslim, although large Christian minorities have settled in the main towns, raising tensions between the two groups.
Since 1999 and the return of a civilian regime to Nigeria's central government, 12 northern states have introduced Islamic Sharia law.
Religious clashes between Muslims and Christians in Bauchi state killed five people in February.
A Muslim mob went on the rampage, attacking Christians and burning churches in reprisals over the burning of two mosques, which Muslims blamed on Christians, they said.
More than 700 people died last November in Jos, capital of Plateau state, when a political feud over a local election degenerated into bloody confrontation between Muslims and Christians.
One of the Nigerian Taliban leaders, Aminu Tashen-Ilimi, told AFP in a 2005 interview that the group intended to lead an armed insurrection and rid society of "immorality" and "infidelity."
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