A fight over a game of billiards disintegrated into religious violence in northern Nigeria, leaving at least four people dead among the smoldering ruins of churches and mosques, AP quoted authorities as saying on Thursday. The attack in the town of Tafawa Balewa in Bauchi state came the same day police said members of a radical Muslim sect killed a police officer guarding a voter registration site in northeast Nigeria. The attack showed the continuing ability of members of the Boko Haram sect to kill at will despite a military and police crackdown, leaving a state police commissioner to admit he cannot guarantee the safety of election officials. The violence also comes ahead of April elections that many worry could ignite simmering ethnic and religious tensions in a country that became a democracy only a decade ago. In Tafawa Balewa, the home of Nigeria's assassinated first prime minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, the violence started Wednesday night, said Borno state police Muhammed Indabawa. Indabawa said a group of youths playing billiards got into an argument, which sparked violence in a town familiar to riots between Nigeria's two main faiths. Paramilitary police patrolled the city's streets Thursday as mosques, churches and homes sat destroyed, Indabawa said. The commissioner said he believed soldiers also would join the security crackdown. «We've mounted road blocks at areas leading to the town to avoid a spillover of the crisis to other areas,» Indabawa said. Meanwhile, Borno state police commissioner Ibrahim Abubakar told The Associated Press on Thursday that an officer in Maiduguri died Wednesday night after being shot while guarding a primary school holding registration equipment. Abubakar said another officer was wounded in an attack by gunmen riding motorcycles, an assault that follows the pattern of others allegedly committed by the Boko Haram sect in the arid, dusty city. -- SPA
