Seven people were shot dead in an overnight attack on a mining site in Nigeria's Central Plateau state, a local youth group and a state official said Friday.
The plateau is one of several ethnically and religiously diverse hinterlands known as the Middle Belt, where sectarian conflict has claimed hundreds of lives in recent years.
The violence is often seen as an ethno-religious conflict between nomadic Muslim herders and largely Christian farmers.
The Berom Youth Moulders-Association (BYM) said the victims, aged between 15 and 28, were murdered late on Wednesday in what it described as part of a pattern of coordinated attacks on Berom communities.
Reuters could not independently confirm who was behind the attack.
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Emmanuel Solomon, a senior aide to the Plateau Governor, confirmed that seven people were killed in the attack.
Plateau police did not immediately comment, but a spokesman for Operation Safe Haven, the military task force in the state, said troops had found seven bodies and lost cartridges at the scene, adding that the victims were miners who had stayed at the site despite a ban on night-time mining.
US President Donald Trump has said Nigerian Christians are being tortured and murdered in record numbers, and launched airstrikes a month ago against alleged perpetrators.
The Nigerian government denies that there is systematic persecution of Christians, but says it is dealing with Islamists and other violent groups who have attacked both Muslim and Christian civilians, often holding them for ransom.
