MISS WORLD RIOTS LEAVE OVER 100 DEAD, HOC CALLS FOR EU BACKING TO FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

residents of Kaduna told Reuters that sporadic shooting could be heard on Friday morning as soldiers and police battled rioters despite a 24-hour curfew in the volatile city, where thousands died in sectarian riots between Christians and Muslims two years ago.
The latest protests began after an article appeared in a newspaper suggesting that the Prophet Mohammed would probably have chosen to marry one of the contestants if he had witnessed the beauty pageant.
On Wednesday hundreds of people chanting "Allahu Akbar" (God is great) attacked the office of This Day newspaper, which printed the offending article. Riots escalated on Thursday as thousands of Muslim youths rampaged through the suburbs of the city, putting up barricades of burning tyres, setting fire to buildings, and attacking churches until hundreds of soldiers arrived to restore order and enforce a 24-hour curfew.
CNN´s Jeff Koinange said the authorities were trying their best but were "overwhelmed" by the scale of the violence.
Shehu Sani of the Kaduna-based Civil Rights Congress told The Associated Press he watched a crowd stab a young man, force a petrol-filled tyre around his neck and burn him alive. Sani said he saw three other bodies elsewhere in the city.
Alsa Hassan, founder of another human rights group, Alsa Care, told AP he saw a commuter being dragged out of his car and beaten to death by protesters.
Hordes of young men were also heard chanting, "Down with beauty" and "Miss World is sin."
Muslim groups complain that the contest is immoral and degrading to women, and are also angry that preliminary events began during the holy month of Ramadan.
Miss World events are only taking place in the southern, largely Christian, part of the country.
A spokesman for the promoters told the BBC the final would go ahead as planned in the capital, Abuja, on 7 December.
The government has appealed for calm and has assured Muslims that those responsible for the This Day article would be brought to book, for exceeding "the bounds of responsible journalism."
This Day has retracted the offending article and has published apologies.
The chairman of the group that owns the Lagos-based paper suggested that a computer glitch could have been to blame for the fact that the story went to press in the first place.
The holding of the Miss World contest in Nigeria has also provoked international controversy.
It had been threatened by a boycott by beauty queens after a woman convicted of adultery, Amina Lawal, was sentenced to death by a Sharia court.
The Nigerian Government moved to calm fears by promising it would not allow any Nigerian to be stoned to death.
About 90 Miss World contestants are already in Nigeria.
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 boycotting 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 to the extremist opinions of those that regard a beauty contest a blasphemous event.