Idriss Koudouss Kone, who doubles as president of the National Islamic Council, cited as proof Wednesday's murder "in cold blood and in broad daylight" of scholar Mohamed Lamine Sangare near a mosque in the main city of Abidjan, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.

Kone said Ivorian soldiers also raided a Muslim quarter in the town of Anyama, just north of Abidjan, on Wednesday, February 19, and killed a Muslim while performing his prayers.

That incident sparked off violence with locals pelting the police and soldiers with stones.

Kone said Muslims in Ivory Coast were being attacked following an uprising in September which saw the northern-dominated Muslim half fall to the insurgents.

Many people in the government-controlled Christian-majority south accuse Muslims of backing the insurgence.

"The Muslim community is threatened, several imams have left Ivory Coast after receiving suspect visits in mosques," he said, adding that he himself was a target of the so-called "death squads" allegedly close to the government.

"People close to power want to start a religious war here and many things point to this fact," added Kone.

He warned that a religious war would be a "catastrophe" for the country, whose social fabric has been rent by the five-month civil war which has widened ethnic and religious chasms.

French President Jacques Chirac said Thursday, February 20, that the existence of death squads in Ivory Coast was a "reality" and warned that those responsible could be charged before international courts.

"All this could end up before the international courts," spokeswoman Catherine Colonna quoted Chirac as saying during an afternoon working session of heads of state at a two-day Franco-African summit in Paris that opened Thursday.

Earlier this month, the United Nations said in a report that the Ivory Coast government was backing death squads who are accused of killing, kidnapping and torturing people with impunity.

The report said the "death squads comprised elements close to the government, the presidential guard and a tribal militia of Betes", the ethnic group to which Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo belongs.

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan told Paris summit participants that the U.N. would send a fact-finding mission on human rights to Ivory Coast "as soon as possible", with Gbagbo's consent, according to Colonna.