By Camillus Eboh
ABUJA, Jan 23 (Reuters) - Seven people were shot dead in an overnight attack at a mining site in Nigeria’s central Plateau state, a local youth group and a state official said on Friday.
Plateau is one of several ethnically and religiously diverse hinterland states known as the Middle Belt, where communal conflict has claimed hundreds of lives in recent years.
The violence is often cast as ethno-religious conflict between nomadic Muslim herders and largely Christian farmers.
The Berom Youth Moulders-Association (BYM) said the victims, aged 15 to 28, had been killed late Wednesday in what it described as part of a pattern of coordinated attacks on Berom communities. Reuters could not independently confirm who was behind the assault.
Emmanuel Solomon, a senior aide to the Plateau governor, confirmed seven people had been killed in the attack.
Plateau police did not immediately comment, but a spokesperson for Operation Safe Haven, the military task force in the state, said troops had found seven bodies and spent cartridges at the scene, adding that the victims were miners who had remained at the site despite a ban on night-time mining.
U.S. President Donald Trump has said Nigerian Christians are being persecuted and killed in record numbers, and launched an airstrike a month ago against alleged perpetrators.
The Nigerian government denies that there is systematic persecution of Christians but says it is tackling Islamists and other violent groups that have attacked both Muslim and Christian civilians, often for ransom.
(Reporting by Camillus Eboh; writing by Elisha Bala-Gbogbo; Editing by Kevin Liffey)
