A Red Cross official told the BBC the whole city was silent. He said no-one knew the exact number of dead, as the mortuary was being guarded by the army.

Officials said clashes erupted when 60 Islamist militants armed with guns and explosives attacked a police station. They said security forces repelled the attack and arrested around 170 people.

Authorities said the militants belonged to Boko Haram, a group that wants Sharia law imposed across Nigeria. Islamic law has been in effect in the state of Bauchi since 2001.

One report put the death toll from Sunday’s attack as high as 50, but there were conflicting reports of the number of casualties.

“The security took control of the corpses and started to transport them to the mortuary,” Red Cross official Adamu Abubakarr told the BBC’s Network Africa from Bauchi.

“Right now the… mortuary is well guarded by security so no one can tell exactly the number of corpses apart from them,” he added.

The BBC’s Caroline Duffield in Nigeria says the military is controlling all roads leading into the area.

The governor of Bauchi state, Isa Yuguda, told AFP the curfew would be in place “for as long as required to restore lasting peace” in the city.

Bauchi was the scene of clashes between Muslim and Christian communities in February that left four people dead.

Nigeria’s 140 million people are split almost equally between Muslims and Christians and the two groups generally live peacefully side by side.

Ever eager not to upset Muslims, the last line in the above BBC report alludes to some kind of long-standing mutual accommodation between Islam and Christianity in Africa’s most populous nation. This is a misrepresentation of the facts.

Islam has been present in Nigeria since the 11th Century, where it spread from the North by proselytisation and trade.

With various Jihad campaigns down the centuries, Sharia was implemented in some Islamic States and many aspects of it were retained in partial form, even through the British Empire years from 1885-1960 (Nigeria was a colony until 1901, then a protectorate until Independence – apart from a brief suspension in the 1990s). It remains a member of the Commonwealth to the present day.

Following Independence, Islamisation was encouraged by various successive governments. Today, roughly half the population is Muslim (predominantly Sunni, with a small number of Shia in Sokoto State) and half the country is Sharia-ruled Muslim territory – see map above.

Tensions began to grow significantly in 1999, when, in Ilorin, Kwara State, fourteen churches were burnt to the ground by suspected Islamic fundamentalists. Other states followed with the introduction of Sharia and further Church burnings and violence ensued.

Sharia is publicly denounced but privately accepted by the current government. According to the African Studies Department at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands:

“Though the Nigerian central government has openly recognised the incompatibility of sharia law with the federal constitution of the nation, President Olusegun Obasanjo has avoided intervening in decisions taken by states that apply Islamic law, merely calling for moderation.

As an outspoken born-again Christian, he knows that vigorous condemnation of strict Islamic law will only inflame passions further and at the same time he fears that the spread of sharia law will increase religious tension and undermine Nigerian unity.”

As usual, the violence is almost always instigated by Muslims against Christians, with the burning of Churches being the enduring hallmark of this Jihad. Nigeria is already half Sharia.

How much longer before it becomes completely Islamic and creeping Muslim expansionism into neighbouring countries commences?

[Main story: BBC News Online]