World watch

Religious organisations at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, have embarked on a week of prayers and fasting imploring God to drive away what they called the "spirit of demons" visiting the campus.

Twenty-four hours after a lecturer at the medical school was gunned down in his hostel room by an unknown assailant, a state special security unit mistook a second-year student for an armed robber and shot him dead. The next day a political science student lost her life during an exchange of gunfire between rival secret cults.

The violent week ended when a priest beat a nun, one of his sociology students, into a coma in a dispute over an interpretation of a passage of the Bible.