This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
In February 2000, the governor of Kaduna State in northern Nigeria announced plans to adopt Sharia criminal law for the state's Muslim population, following several other northern states that had done the same since Nigeria's return to civilian rule the previous year. Kaduna was different from those states in one important way: it was roughly evenly split between Muslims, concentrated in the north of the state, and Christians, concentrated in the south, with the state capital itself religiously mixed.
Christian residents and the Christian Association of Nigeria organized a protest march against the plan on February 21. What began as a peaceful demonstration was, according to numerous witnesses Human Rights Watch later interviewed, hijacked by groups intent on violence, and the protest collapsed into rioting between Christian and Muslim residents that spread across the city within hours. A Kaduna State judicial commission of inquiry later found at least 1,295 people killed in the February violence alone; a second wave of killing followed in May. Human Rights Watch's own review of the crisis concluded the true toll of the combined February and May violence was considerably higher, and was never conclusively established.
Kaduna State went on to adopt Sharia criminal law despite the bloodshed. The riots left the city more residentially segregated along religious lines than before, hardened distrust between its communities, and set the backdrop of unresolved grievance against which a much smaller but similarly patterned riot broke out in the city again in November 2002.