Religious crisis: All the people burnt to death were muslims says Zamfara state gov

Abdulaziz Yari, the Zamfara State Governor yesterday while condemning the religious crisis that broke out in the Abdu Gusau Polytechnic in Talata Mafara in the state on Tuesday which resulted in the death of eight people disclosed that false alarm was what led to the killing and he debunked insinuations that it was a religious clash in which Christians were killed stating that the causalities were Muslims.

Speaking shortly to state House corespondents after his meeting with President Buhari yesterday, Governor Yari said: "From the intelligence I heard from the security agencies, there was a fight between two students and I think one of them injured the other and started shouting that the other person abused Prophet Muhammed. Other students came and beat the other boy who is Yoruba and from Kogi State. Some people are saying he was a Muslim and some say the boy was a Christian. They beat the student until he collapsed and thought he was dead. 

Then security personnel requested help from one shop owner who then took the boy to the hospital in his car. When the students heard that the boy was still alive and in the hospital, they went to the hospital.  But the boy was rescued by the army in the hospital. 

Then the students went back to the polytechnic and burnt down the shop of the person who gave his car to rescue the boy. 

They went back to town again and as you know the police in the division don’t have enough men to contain the riot and before reinforcement came, the crowd threw tyre in the man’s house and burnt the house down. That was how everybody in the house was killed and everybody killed in the House were Muslims and not like the rumours going around in the social media that Christians are being killed in Zamfara. 

In fact the mob wanted to go and burn churches and attack non- Muslims but the security forces stopped them. It’s my home town and that’s where I live.”

The governor said no arrest had been made at the time he left the state for Abuja. The police and the Department of State Service (DSS), he said, were investigating the incident.