At least 10 people were killed after thousands of rioting...

At least 10 people were killed after thousands of rioting Muslim youths torched churches, looted shops and destroyed vehicles in the northern Nigerian city of Kaduna amid rising Muslim fury over the country's staging of the Miss World pageant. Authorities clamped a curfew on the city about 375 miles northwest of Lagos as soldiers were drafted to help police contain rioting. "As I stand in the street I can see a church burning in the Malali-Badarawa area. I have counted no less than 10 churches burned," said one resident. "I have seen and filmed two dead bodies on the streets." Kaduna state commissioner for information Isah Abdullahi announced the 6:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. curfew in a radio broadcast intended to calm the city, where thousands died in religious clashes two years ago. The government of President Olusegun Obasanjo appealed for calm, and warned that anyone found fomenting disorder would be decisively dealt with.The violence was the latest crisis sparked by Nigeria's plans to hold the Miss World contest, already hit by controversy after beauty queens threatened to protest against the sentencing of Muslim women in northern Nigeria to death by stoning for adultery. Witnesses in Kaduna said the protesters were blockading major highways with bonfires, destroying vehicles and attacking hotels. "Some churches have been burned and people have also been killed, but I have no figures," said one senior police officer who asked not to be named. Rioting first flared on November 20, initially over a newspaper report linking the name of the Prophet Mohammad to the pageant. But it quickly turned into a general protest against the December 7 contest in the national capital, Abuja. The fundamentalist Nigerian Muslim Umma, an umbrella group of Islamic clerics and scholars, declaring a "serious religious emergency," issued a statement calling on the government to stop the pageant. Witnesses said hundreds of irate youths chanting "Allahu Akbar" (God is greatest) descended on the Kaduna office of This Day, a leading independent daily which November 16 ran an article saying that the Prophet Mohammad would have married one of the beauty queens. The paper ran a front-page apology, the third since publication of the story, which it said went out in error. But this failed to appease Muslim groups in the largely Islamic north of the country who have decreed a ban on the paper. Hands Off Cain, in a press statement, called on the European Union to back the Nigerian federal government in the difficult task of ensuring the peaceful cohabitation between the country's Christians and Muslims. Isolating Nigeria, as heeding calls for a boycott of the Miss World contest would have done, would mean giving a free hand to Muslim fundamentalists. HOC urged the contestants that are still boycotting the contest - the representatives of Denmark, Austria, Switzerland, Costa Rica, Panama and Tahiti - to reconsider their position as the current situation in Nigeria has gone beyond the issue of Amina Lawal's death sentence, and the main threat is now posed by the extremist opinions of those that regard a beauty contest a blasphemous event.