Peter Oborne and Andy Wells on their investigations into sectarian violence in Nigeria.
It was silent, apart from the sound of birdsong, as we entered the village of Kuru Karama. Every building we could see had been burnt or destroyed. We could see no villagers, just two or three soldiers at a guard post dozing in the afternoon sun.
Walking deeper into the village we came across a group of young men and women. Had they been there on the day of the massacre? No, they knew nothing. Were they Christian or Muslim? Christian.
At length we found a guide, Abdullah, to show us around. He took us to a little square and pointed out the wells into which killers had thrown scores of dead bodies, head downwards. Some of the bodies were so decomposed that they could not removed.
Abdullah had lost 13 members of his family - including his wife - in the carnage. When her body was pulled out of the well three days later he could not recognise her face it was so mutilated. He took us to a sewage pit in which, so he said, 30 babies between the ages of six months and three years old had been thrown.
At around 10.30am, three vans parked outside the village. A gang of young men, and some women, emerged. Their faces were painted red and they chanted 'kill, kill, kill'. Armed with guns and machetes, they surrounded the village and went from house to house until approximately 170 villagers were dead. At 6.30pm, sunset, someone blew a whistle and the killers got back into their vans and sped away.
Kuru Karama is a half-hour drive south from the central Nigerian town of Jos, which used to be known (in Britain at least) for two reasons: a young John Major worked as a bank clerk here in the early 1960s before a bad car accident forced him to return to Britain and take up politics; and John Mikel Obi was brought up in Jos before travelling to London and establishing himself as a midfield star for Chelsea FC. The town is high up on the Nigerian central plateau and, as a result, the climate is much more pleasant than in the steamy cities like Port Harcourt and Lagos, and at the height of the British Empire was used by grateful Britons as a resort.
Tragically, Jos is now a hive of sectarian violence. Nigeria’s population of around 170 million people is more or less evenly divided between Christians in the south and Muslims in the north. It is the misfortune of Jos to find itself on the demarcation line between Muslims and Christians.
But who were the killers? We travelled to the backstreets of Jos to meet Yahusa Sani, a local gang leader. He was around 30 years old and was missing a right hand, which had been hacked off by a machete. Yahusa told us how during elections he made good money by stuffing ballot boxes, intimidating voters and employing other strongarm tactics. At other times, he was heavily involved in the drug trade and sold bootleg petrol. He had been heavily involved in the fighting, so he told us. He saw no end to the violence.
But it seems to us that practically everyone in Jos got caught up in the killing. The killers boasted about it openly, and there is no fear of arrest. There was not one prosecution after the riots of 2008, and this time round shows no sign of being different. And while rioters can maim and kill with impunity the same terri able things will happen again and again.
And so it came as no surprise to learn of horrendous reprisal attacks just a few days after our return to Britain. This time round, the main victims were the Christians. When Nigeria secured independence from Britain more than half a century ago it was hailed as a rainbow nation like South Africa or Brazil, embracing many different tribes, sects, religions and ethic identities. The terrible killings in Jos - and the total inability of the Nigerian state to halt them or to punish the perpetrators - raise fresh questions about whether Nigeria can hold together, and indicate the possibility of a murderous civil war. Some would say it has already begun.
