20100830
reuters

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria (Reuters) - Four policemen have been shot dead over the past month in the northern Nigerian town of Maiduguri, raising fears that a radical Islamic sect behind an uprising which killed hundreds a year ago is making a return.

Two officers were killed last week by attackers who trailed them from a police station, shot them and stole their rifles, police commissioner Ibrahim Abdu said over the weekend. Two similar incidents happened weeks earlier.

The usually quiet town of Maiduguri, the dusty capital of northeastern Borno state, was rocked a year ago by rioting by the Boko Haram militant sect which wants sharia (Islamic law) imposed more widely in Africa's most populous nation.

Nearly 800 people were killed, many of them shot by the security forces, in gunbattles which raged for days as the police and army fought to put down the uprising by sect members armed with home-made guns, machetes and knives.

Abdu declined to comment on whether Boko Haram were thought to be behind the latest killings, saying he did not want to jeopardise the investigation, but other police and local officials said sect members were the prime suspects.

"There's no doubt that there is a resurgence of Boko Haram in Maiduguri. I'm sure they are the ones killing members of the police," local community leader Alhaji Bukar Kolo told Reuters.

He said a medicine store owner who refused to treat Boko Haram members with gunshot wounds during the fighting last year had also been called out of his home and shot in the street by assailants who rode off on motorbikes.

Followers of Boko Haram -- which means "Western education is sinful" in the Hausa language spoken across northern Nigeria -- pray in separate mosques and wear long beards and the women wear headscarves.