Politician shot dead in Nigeria unrest

Gunmen have murdered a prominent Nigerian politician, in what appears to be the latest in a growing number of political killings before elections this month.

Yemi Oni, a financial backer of Niyi Adebayo, the governor of Ekiti state in south-western Nigeria, was shot dead on Saturday, moments after returning home from a political rally, police said yesterday. In the past three months, hundreds of people have died in unrest, political killings and assassinations linked to a general election on 12 April, and presidential elections a week later.

Emmanuel Inyang, a police spokesman, said he believed the shooting of Mr Oni was an assassination because nothing had been taken from his home. "It does not appear to be a robbery. We think they were hired killers," he said.

The polls are the first organised by the current administration since it took power from a previous military regime, ending more than 15 years of military misrule, in May 1999. More than 100 European Union election monitors arrived in Nigeria in the middle of last month to observe the election, which President Olusegun Obasanjo has warned will be tarnished by the wave of violence. "Any victory emerging from an election conducted in the prevailing circumstances will be tainted by the scale of its corrupted political environment," he said last month.

The worst violence has been in the oil-producing Niger Delta region in a long-running dispute over local election boundaries around the city of Warri. Dozens of people have died, villages have been destroyed and Western oil companies have cut their output.

Production in the world's sixth largest oil exporter has been slashed by 40 per cent, adding to the pressure on world oil prices caused by the war in Iraq. Last month the Red Cross appealed for assistance in coping with the tens of thousands of people displaced by the elections unrest.