Death toll in Nigeria now reported at 700

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria - A Nigerian military official said yesterday that about 700 people were killed in the northern city of Maiduguri during recent fighting between police and a radical Islamist sect. The toll was previously thought to be about 300.

Col. Ben Ahanotu said that mass burials had begun because bodies were decomposing in the heat. The Islamist compound destroyed last week by government troops is one of the burial sites, he said.

"They've got almost 700 bodies," Ahanotu, who is in charge of security in Maiduguri, said of officials gathering corpses.

"Right there, they had to do a mass burial there because there are a lot of bodies inside," he said, pointing to what used to be the Boko Haram sect leader's compound. It is now smoldering rubble with digging equipment around it.

The fighting affected other northern cities, too. The total death toll is unknown.

Maiduguri, the Borno state capital, was largely quiet yesterday. Its streets had been cleared of bodies and the blood spilled during five days of fierce fighting. Banks and markets reopened.

But sporadic violence continued.

In the parking lot of the Umaru Shehu hospital, reporters saw the body of a young man with his hands tied behind his back, dead from a bullet through the back of his head. A hospital official, who asked not to be named because he feared more violence, said five other people were killed yesterday, their bodies left in the parking lot.