LAGOS, Aug 22 (AFP) - Authorities in Nigeria's southern Rivers State have launched an investigation into clashes in a village in the oil-rich Niger Delta region in which more than a dozen people were killed, a government spokesman said Sunday.
The police have confirmed recovering 13 bodies after a bloody clash last Sunday between rival political factions in Ataba village, while newspaper reports put the death toll at more than 30.
Rivers State set up a judicial panel to look into the causes of the unrest and report their findings within 21 days, Emmanual Okah told AFP in a telephone interview.
The probe panel, expected to recommend appropriate punishment for culprits in the unrest, is headed by a senior judge, Peter Agumagu, he said.
Commissioner Charles Akaya, the Rivers State chief of police, said that a dozen corpses had been found floating in the swamps since the clash over a chieftancy title in the village.
He said that a large number of arrests had been made and that 90 spent cartridges -- mainly from 7.62 millimetre assault rifles -- had been found in the remote community in the wetlands east of the oil city of Port Harcourt.
The Niger Delta, the heartland of Africa's oil industry, has long been prey to factional violence, piracy and ethnic warfare.
A recent report by security experts commissioned by the Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell estimated the annual death toll from the fighting at more than 1,000.