Nigeria Troops Fire Shots to Disperse anti-U.S. Protest

Nigerian soldiers fired live rounds in the air outside a mosque in the flashpoint city of Jos on Friday to disperse a crowd planning protests over a U.S.-made anti-Islam film, a spokesman said.

The soldiers "had to fire some warning shots in the air, but there were no casualties," Captain Salihu Mustapha, military spokesman in Plateau state, told Agence France Presss, putting the crowd at several hundred. "The placards they were carrying were denouncing America."

The U.S. Embassy in Nigeria has warned that "extremists may attempt to target U.S citizens and other Westerners."

Previous violence by a radical Islamist sect known as Boko Haram saw the embassy ban travel for its staff to the north for much of this year. The sect is blamed for killing more than 670 people this year alone, according to an Associated Press count.

Nigeria is a nation of more than 160 million people largely split between a Muslim north and a Christian south.