Rioting between Muslims and Christians in the northern Nigerian city of Kaduna has claimed at least 100 lives, the Red Cross said, as local leaders tried to calm anger over an article on the Miss World pageant.Federal officials were in Kaduna for crisis talks with local religious leaders, who have appealled for calm following three days of bloody disturbances in the flashpoint city, state spokesman Muktar Sirajo told AFP.

The fighting was triggered on Wednesday when Muslim youths burned down a newspaper office in protest at a "blasphemous" article which suggested that the Prophet Mohammed would have liked to marry a Miss World beauty queen.

The international pageant is due to take place in the Nigerian capital Abuja on December 7 and the presence of the 90 beauty queens in the country has offended the conservative sensibilities of many Muslims.

But since the fighting started in Kaduna the riots have degenerated into a street battle between parts of the city's rival Muslim and Christian communities, local agencies said Friday.

Similar clashes there two years ago left more than 2,000 people dead.

George Bennet, regional representative of the International Federation of the Red Cross, said that a 50-strong Nigerian Red Cross emergency team in Kaduna had confirmed 100 deaths.

"There are also indications that the trouble has flared again this morning," he told AFP in Lagos.

Earlier a spokesman for the Nigerian Red Cross was unable to confirm the death toll, but said that at least 521 injured people had been evacuated by volunteer medical teams to city hospitals.

Shehu Sani, head of the Kaduna-based Civil Rights Congress told AFP by telephone from the city that observers from his agency had seen 50 dead and many injured in various parts of the city.

"The situation has further aggravated, there have been more burnings of churches and mosques," he said. "Initially the attacks were mostly by Muslims, but now Christians are retaliating."

Reverend James Wuye, who represents an inter-faith group set up to broker peace between the communities, confirmed that a riot that began as a Muslim protest was now a sectarian conflict.

"Last night there were reprisal attacks against Muslims in the northern part of Kaduna," he said. "Now there is an uneasy calm. Religious leaders are meeting with the state governor this morning to try and find a way to restore peace."

All three officials said that a curfew due to end this morning had been extended through the day, and that smoke was hanging over the burned ruins of several homes and places of worship.

Troops and police have been deployed in the town and roads north and south have been blocked, Sani said.

It is not yet clear how the majority of the deaths were caused. Witnesses spoke of people being stabbed in the street or burned in their homes.

A Kaduna businessman, Shehu Dikko, told AFP that police and soldiers had also fired on rioters. In many previous Nigerian riots large numbers of casualties have been caused by police action.

There are also fears that trouble could spread to other Nigerian cities. Sani said that he had heard reports of trouble in Zaria, 70 kilometres (43 miles) further north.

Tensions were also high in Kano, the largest city in Nigeria's mainly Muslim north, ahead of Friday prayers. Religious leaders there have warned that it many be difficult to control the anger of local youths.

On Wednesday an influential panel of moderate Muslim scholars described the Miss World contest as "a wanton promotion of immorality through nudity" and called on Nigeria's President Olusegun Obasanjo to ban it from going ahead.

The government has yet to reposnd to that call, but it has vowed to prosecute the leading daily This Day for the article last weekend that caused the tensions to boil over.

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Rioting between Muslims and Christians in the northern Nigerian city of Kaduna has claimed at least 100 lives, the Red Cross said, as local leaders tried to calm anger over an article on the Miss World pageant