Dozens of villagers in central Nigeria were killed early Sunday, victims of apparent reprisal attacks over recent clashes between Christians and Muslims. A government spokesman said there were more than 300 dead, but that figure that could not be independently verified.  The killings took place near the city of Jos, for years a hotbed of ethnic and religious violence near the dividing line between the country’s mainly Christian south and Muslim north. Hundreds on both sides were killed as recently as January, though the victims this time were Christians, according to the information commissioner for Plateau State, Gregory Yenlong, and a local human rights organization.  Many appeared to have been cut down with machetes after being driven from homes set ablaze by attackers in the predawn darkness, said Shamaki Gad Peter of the League for Human Rights, a Nigerian group.  Mr. Yenlong said the attackers were “hoodlums, Fulani herdsmen” — Muslims from a neighboring state, Bauchi, who were going after Christian members of Plateau’s leading ethnic group, the Berom, in the villages of Ratt and Dogona Hauwa.  “They attacked those villages and killed well over 300 people, mostly women, children and the aged,” Mr. Yenlong said. “They killed them unprovoked. Innocent people were massacred.”  - New York Times