City under curfew, pageant departs

ABUJA - The riot-torn city of Kaduna was under curfew as contestants for the Miss World pageant left Nigeria for London last night after more than 200 people died in violence provoked by the contest.

Relieved beauty queens slipped out of their luxury hotel to board a chartered Cameroon Airlines Boeing 747 flight to London, the new venue for an event which remains scheduled for December 7.

Religious tensions were still running high in the nearby mainly Muslim northern city of Kaduna, where most of the violence has taken place, despite the decision to move the pageant from Abuja. More than 4000 people have fled their homes, according to the Red Cross, and about 1000 have taken refuge in a local brewery compound guarded by soldiers.

Saturday's decision to abandon Miss World Nigeria followed a third day of Muslim-Christian blood-letting in Kaduna, site of previous religious violence.

Red Cross workers said last night that at least 215 people had been killed in the rioting, sparked by a newspaper article on the pageant which had angered Muslims.

Eyewitnesses said violence continued yesterday, although a Red Cross spokesman said calm had returned by mid-afternoon local time to streets where scorched bodies lay next to burned houses, overturned cars and looted shops.

"What has happened is a bit of a shame because the international press has highlighted a little incidence of some rioting way out of all proportion," Guy Murray-Bruce, the director of Miss World Nigeria, said.

The rioting began on Thursday as a protest against an article in a national newspaper that offended Muslims because it said the Prophet Mohammad would have married one of the Miss World beauty queens were he alive today.

Disappointed Nigerians watched the beauty queens leave from the windows of the hotel lobby. "This is a very sad moment. It is Nigeria's biggest international disaster," one spectator said.

The largely Islamic north of Nigeria has witnessed deadly eruptions of sectarian and ethnic clashes since about a dozen states began implementing strict Muslim sharia law in 2000.

The British-run Miss World Organisation and its local representatives, Silver Bird Promotions, said the decision to move the venue was taken "in the overall interests of Nigeria and the contestants".

Although Nigeria's This Day newspaper apologised for running the November 16 article, the newspaper said editor Simon Kolawole was arrested on Saturday. Police in Abuja said they arrested 58 people on Saturday after riots following prayers at the city's main mosque, just a stone's throw from the hotel where contestants were staying.

Pageant spokeswoman Stella Din spoke of tearful scenes on Friday when the real extent of the Kaduna rioting became evident from television news. "A lot of the girls didn't sleep that night, and usually they are a lively bunch," Din said.

Julia Morley, head of the Miss World Organisation, blamed the foreign press for the uproar because they "deliberately tried to tear Nigeria to pieces" over sharia in the run-up to the event.

"You pulled Nigeria down and you allowed Nigeria to be humiliated," Morley told reporters.

In particular, Morley took exception to stories which appeared in the international press about the use of amputation as a punishment by Islamic courts in northern Nigeria.

She tried to see a silver lining in the pageant's curtailed visit.

"We've got massive and wonderful footage of Nigeria and we're going to use it at the final in London. The heart of the show is here in Nigeria ... because it's a Nigerian show."

- AGENCIES