Lawmakers in a mostly Muslim Nigerian state have approved legislation calling for Muslims to be whipped and Christians to be jailed if they are caught drinking alcohol, officials said Saturday, raising fears of renewed violence after sectarian fighting left 500 dead elsewhere in the country in recent days.
The bill, which was passed on Thursday, must be signed by the governor of northern Kano state before becoming law.
Lawmakers called for Muslims to be whipped with "80 strokes of the cane" if caught drinking alcohol, the speaker of Kano's legislature, Saidu Balarabe Gani, said in broadcasts on local radio stations.
The penalty for Christians would be a fine of 50,000 naira (US$380), a one-year jail term or both, Gani said.
Most of Kano's 8 million people are Muslim.
Several other northern states have officially banned alcohol and instituted punishments for Muslims, but they are rarely enforced. Christian civilians are permitted to drink in establishments on federal military and police installations.
Muslim clerics earlier expressed anger over what a Red Cross official said were the killings of 500 to 600 people in attacks on May 2 and May 4 by Christian militants on the Muslim town of Yelwa in the majority-Christian central state of Plateau.
Christian church leaders have distanced themselves from the killings, blaming them on rogue criminal elements.
On the streets of Kano, the state's main city, groups of men -- both Muslim and Christian -- huddled around radios and debated the proposed anti-drinking law.
Some non-Muslims reacted with alarm.
"This is an attempt to cause bloodshed," shouted Adams Yakubu, who said he was Christian. If authorities try to enforce the alcohol ban on Christians and animists, "only God knows what will follow," he warned.
"Some of these people are just looking for ways of repeating what is happening" in violence-torn Plateau state where hundreds, possibly thousands, have been killed in fighting between Muslim and Christian groups since January, said another man, Samson Ibrahim.
More than 10,000 people have been killed in intertwined ethnic, religious and political violence in Nigeria since President Olusegun Obasanjo was first elected in 1999, ending 15 years of repressive military rule.
Much of the violence has occurred between rival Christian and Muslim factions in Kano and other cities after a dozen northern states began implementing Islamic Sharia law in late 1999.
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