About 200 people have been feared dead in the past three days in Plateau state, in the north central region of Nigeria following communal clashes, said an authoritative government source Wednesday.

The source, who insisted on anonymity said in a telephone interview from the state capital Jos that the recent crisis which erupted on Sunday continued till Monday when the police eventually intervened.

He said that the figures which he personally collated from "usually reliable sources'' showed that the casualty figure was much high than the 67 given by the police.

"The police could be pardoned because they might not have seen all the corpses as most of them were quickly removed,'' he said.

He said that many of the removed corpses were given mass burial in sites that could be verified while others were taken by their relatives for proper burial.

Abdulkadir Orire, secretary general of Nigeria's main Muslim body the Jama'atu Nasril Islam, was quoted by local media as saying that between 200 and 250 people were killed in the clash, while many more have disappeared.

According to Orire, heavily armed militants from the Christian Tarok ethnic group attacked Fulanis in Yelwa, a farming community in the Shendam local government area of central Nigeria's Plateau state, 338 km east of the capital Abuja, on Sunday, in what was suspected to be a revenge for three Taroks killed last month.

Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo on Tuesday directed police"to take all the necessary action" needed to restore order in central Nigeria.

The president was worried by the recent escalation of violence in Plateau, and called for restraint between the feuding parties, Christian Taroks and Muslim Fulanis, said a statement issued by the presidency.

Obasanjo urged all the parties to the conflicts in the state to "sheath their swords and choose the path of peace and dialogue for the resolution of their differences."

In compliance with the presidential directive, Inspector-General of Police Tafa Balogun had reportedly deployed six additional units of heavily armed policemen to the area.

A police statement later said that some 4,000 mobile policemen had been dispatched to the area.

Plateau has suffered intermittent clashes between the two rivals over fertile land. In September 2001, more than 1,000 people were killed during a week of sectarian violence in Jos. Andone report put the death toll in last three months at over 400.

As a multiethnic African country, Nigeria has a growing population of over 130 million belonging to 373 ethnic groups. Since Obasanjo took office in 1999, ending 15 years of military rule, Nigeria has seen frequent eruption of ethnic, religious and political violence that killed more than 10,000 people.

Source: Xinhua