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AFP - Frightened residents flooded a military checkpoint to flee the Nigerian city of Jos on Sunday after Muslim-Christian clashes that killed some 450 people and left scores of buildings burnt.

While the fighting has subsided in the central city and troops have been deployed to end the unrest, fleeing residents said they remained too frightened to stay.

At a military checkpoint on the outskirts of Jos, where long queues of cars and buses carrying fleeing residents formed, soldiers searched all vehicles, an AFP reporter saw. Several vehicles were laden with baggage.

"The last few days have been very traumatising for me and my two children," Samira Yaya, 32, told AFP as she was leaving Jos.

"My husband is out of the country on a business trip. We were indoors without food or water with killings and burnings all around us. I am going to Kano to stay with my family until my husband returns. I feel uneasy here."

Danladi Kabir, a 28-year-old trader, told AFP as he crammed luggage into a taxi that he was leaving Jos for his Jigawa home state in Northern Nigeria.

"My family in Jigawa has been agitated over the fighting in Jos and my safety," he said. "The best way to assure them I am alive is to visit home."

At least 150 bodies were recovered from wells after the clashes, a village head said Saturday, taking the unofficial death toll compiled from various sources to 464.

State officials have given no official death toll for the violence, which broke out on January 17 in Jos, capital of Plateau State, and spread to nearby towns and villages.

Dozens of cars, houses, churches and mosques were also burnt during the four days of unrest. A curfew remained in effect between 5:00 pm and 10:00 am.

The head of Kuru Karama village, Umar Baza, told AFP that 150 bodies were dug out from the wells and that 60 more people were still missing.

Kuru Karama is a Muslim enclave in a Christian region 30 kilometres (18 miles) south of Jos.

Global rights watchdog Human Rights Watch (HRW) told AFP on Saturday that, according to figures provided by Muslim leaders, at least 364 Muslims died in the clashes.

"As of yesterday (Friday), at least 364 Muslims have died in Jos, including those found in wells in Kuru Karama. This information was provided by Muslim officials in Jos," HRW's spokesman Eric Guttschuss told AFP by telephone from Washington.

Although the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) has not provided a comprehensive death toll of its members in the fighting, one of its officials, Chung Dabo, had earlier told AFP that 55 Christians had died.

At the Saint Michael's Catholic Cathedral in Jos, located at the heart of the fighting, Archbishop Ignatius Kaigama, during his Sunday sermon, appealed for calm.

Before about 3,000 faithful, he castigated both Christians and Muslims involved and those who instigated the deadly fighting.

Christian and Muslim leaders in Plateau State have both said the unrest owed more to the failure of political leaders to address ethnic differences than inter-faith rivalries.

Jos has been a hotbed of religious violence in Nigeria, whose 150 million people are divided almost equally between followers of the two faiths.

An estimated 200 people were killed in religious clashes in the city in late 2008.