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Villagers wail as excavators heap earth on the bodies of dozens of children and women after more than 500 Christians were hacked to death with machetes in a weekend attack on a Nigerian Christian village.
This group of dead -- 40 women and children -- are laid in rows inside a mass grave carved out of the ground in bush outside the city of Jos, capital of central Plateau state plagued by ethno-religious violence.
As the women weep loudly, grim-faced men watch the excavators fill the grave.
The once-virgin bush on the fringes of the village of Dogo Nahawa turned into a cemetery overnight, after more than 500 Christians were hacked to death with machetes in a three-hour orgy of violence on Sunday close to Jos.
Cactus branches cover other fresh graves, filled in earlier.
David Kyeng, a local vigilante who fled to the hills when the attackers raided the three Christian villages, estimates hundreds of herdsmen from the Muslim Fulani staged the slaughter.
"I saw these attackers shooting into the air, scaring people out of their homes and hacking them as they tried to flee," he tells AFP.
Pregnant women and children were among the scores of people cut down by axes, daggers and cutlasses, officials said.
Much of the violence was centred on Dogo Nahawa, where gangs set fire to straw-thatched mud huts as they pursued the rampage. Around two-thirds of the houses are burnt to the ground.
Amid the devastation and heartache, tensions are running high: around 30 men attack and wound a Muslim journalist covering the funeral, accusing him of spying.
He is pushed to the ground, kicked and pelted with rocks. A government official who tries to intervene is punched and left with a bloody nose.
"It is a provocation that you come here after all the dastardly things done by your people to our kids and kin," one yongster yells.
Police fired warning shots to disperse the mob and pull the journalist -- his nose broken and face swollen -- into their car and drive him to a hospital.
After the burial, surviving men from the Christian villages huddle in groups to talk, the subject of their discussions unclear.
Other Christian elders speak of "yet another jihad (holy war) and provocation".
The weekend's explosion of violence is the latest between rival ethnic and religious groups in the same area. In January 326 people died in clashes in and around Jos, according to police, although rights activists put the overall toll at more than 550.
