More violence in the name of religion, but this time it is not the Muslims.

An enraged mob of Nigerian Christian youths has slaughtered dozens of Muslims in two days of rioting in the southern city of Onitsha.

Rioting broke out in the lawless trading town on the banks of the Niger River yesterday when members of the Igbo tribe launched revenge attacks in response to an earlier massacre of Christians in the north of the country.

It is such a primitive thing to kill those who do not believe in the same religion that you do. Christians are always talking about how civilized their religion is, and how brutal the Muslims religion is, well not in this case.

Frank Nweke, a magazine editor who ran the gauntlet of the mob to escape Onitsha and made it to the bridge, said he had seen 15 more corpses lying in the streets of the city.

"Some of them had been beheaded, others had had their genitals removed. I saw one boy holding a severed head with blood dripping from it," he said.