More than 200 people have been killed in two days of clashes between Christians and Muslims in central Nigeria, the Red Cross said yesterday, during the worst unrest in the country for years.

The army sent reinforcements to enforce a 24-hour curfew in the city of Jos, which lies at the flashpoint where Nigeria's Muslim north and Christian south meet, after rival gangs set fire to churches and mosques.

'I counted 218 dead bodies at Masalaci Jummaa [mosque]. There are many other bodies in the streets,' said a Red Cross official, who asked not to be named. That death toll did not include hospital mortuaries, victims already buried, or those taken to other places of worship. The final count could be much higher, officials said.

About 7,000 people had fled their homes and were sheltering in government buildings and religious centres, the Red Cross said.

The governor of Plateau state, of which Jos is the capital, said in a statement that troops had orders to shoot on sight to enforce the curfew in neighbourhoods hit by the violence. Gunfire and explosions heard in the early hours of Saturday later died down, but many streets remained deserted. Military checkpoints were set up around the city and soldiers helped to clear bodies from the streets.

'The situation demanded that we send in additional troops from neighbouring states,' said a Nigerian army spokesman, Brigadier General Emeka Onwuamaegbu.

Violence started on Thursday night as groups of youths burnt tyres on the roads after reports of election rigging. Bodies from the Muslim Hausa community were brought into the central mosque compound. The local imam, Sheikh Khalid Abubakar, said more than 300 bodies were brought there on Saturday alone. Those killed in the Christian community would probably be taken to the city morgue, raising the possibility that the death toll could be much higher.

Police spokesman Bala Kassim said there were 'many dead', but could not give a firm number. Despite the overnight curfew groups in some areas took to the streets again as soon as police patrols had passed by.

The unrest is the most serious of its kind in a country of 140 million people, split roughly equally between Christians and Muslims, since President Umaru Yar'Adua took power in May 2007.

Christians and Muslims generally live peacefully side by side in Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, but hostility has simmered before in Plateau. Hundreds were killed in fighting in Jos in 2001. Three years later, hundreds more died in clashes in Yelwa, leading the then President Olusegun Obasanjo to declare a state of emergency.

The tensions in Plateau have their roots in decades of resentment by indigenous minority groups, mostly Christian or animist, towards migrants and settlers who come from Nigeria's Hausa-speaking Muslim north.