KADUNA, Nigeria, November 24 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - The Miss World beauty circus fled to Britain Sunday, November 24, while in northern Nigeria the death toll continued to mount in bloody sectarian rioting fuelled by anti-Prophet remarks published at a local paper.

Canceling the pageant is seen as a victory for Nigerian Muslims, who constitute 65% of the 120 million population. It is, meanwhile, an embarrassment to Nigerian President Olusugan Obasanjo, who supported the contest publicly, only hours before its cancellation.

One of Nigeria's most prominent Islamic leaders Saturday, November 23, welcomed the decision not to hold the Miss World pageant in his country and called for an end to violent protests by fellow Muslims.

Lateef Adegbite, Secretary General of the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs in Nigeria, told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that he hoped Muslims would forgive a newspaper whose article on Miss World triggered bloody riots that have left at least 100 dead.

"The decision to move the pageant to London was the best in the circumstances. It will go a long way to douse the tension created by the event," he said.

He said protesters should also take the apologies given by the newspaper This Day, which last week published a story that many Muslims felt insulted the Prophet Muhammad.

"They (newspaper) have shown remorse and repentance and I urge Muslims to forgive and forget in the spirit of Islam," he added.

However, the National Union for Muslim Youth in Nigeria declared Saturday that moving the contest out of Nigeria is a local issue, but defaming Prophet Muhammad is an abuse directed to more than one billion Muslims worldwide.

As around 90 contestants arrived in London, the Nigerian Red Cross said that the toll in the flashpoint city of Kaduna passed the 200 mark and that violence linked to the event was expected to continue, reported AFP.

Some 1,125 have been injured and 11,000 driven from their burning homes by mobs in violence between Muslims and Christians that broke out in Kaduna Thursday, November 22, it said.

"There has not been calm overnight, there have been more killings," Nigerian Red Cross president Emmanuel Ijewere said. "More people are coming in for treatment. This has continued and we're expecting more trouble today."

Despite these fears, however, the situation remained calm in Kaduna during the day for the first time in four days, with a massive security presence and tough overnight curfew.

Meanwhile, a bitter row erupted over how a beauty pageant could have unleashed such a violent reaction.

The Nigerian government and Miss World president Julia Morley were united in blaming the media - both international coverage and a controversial article in the Nigerian press - for starting the trouble, then undermining Miss World by reporting it.

"There's an international conspiracy just to show that an African country like Nigeria cannot host this thing," Information Minister Jerry Gana told state radio.

"I think Nigerians should be really angry with the international press."

Gana and Morley also criticized an article which appeared last week in the Nigerian daily This Day, which offended Muslims by claiming that if the Prophet were alive today, he would have approved of the contest and might have married one of the contestants.

But Muslim leaders insisted that anger at the contest was not solely generated by press coverage, and that they had always considered it an immodest spectacle which should not have been brought to Nigeria during the holy month of Ramadan.

"The pageant was the root cause of the riots because if it had not been for the pageant hosting controversy, the blasphemous article would not have been written," Nabiu Baba Ahmed, secretary of the National Council of Sharia in Nigeria, told AFP.

Hosting the beauty queens during Ramadan is unacceptable to Muslims, he said at his home in Kaduna, lambasting the federal government for supporting its organizers.

"Shifting the pageant from Nigeria is a wise decision, which should have been taken earlier, but it is unfortunate that the government doesn't respond to the wishes of the people unless something unpleasant happens," he said.

Muslim citizens in the riot-ravaged suburbs of Kaduna said that they opposed the pageant from the outset. In the weeks leading up to the arrival of the contestants many influential Muslim leaders had called for it to be banned.

Residents in city flashpoints told AFP that a measure of calm had returned to the city Sunday following a tough overnight security operation, but groups including the Red Cross confirmed that sporadic fighting had continued in some areas.

Hospitals in the city were full to overflowing with residents injured in sectarian attacks by rival Christian and Muslim gangs, or shot by the security forces, whom many victims accused of firing indiscriminately.

Meanwhile, This Day Sunday sacked the author of the article on the Miss World beauty contest which sparked violent unrest.

The chairman of the media company that owns the paper said Sunday the management had sacked style writer Isioma Daniel, who wrote the offending story. The announcement came in the latest of a string of front-page apologies for the piece.

"As for the writer of the offensive article, she is pleading forgiveness. She has also offered her resignation for inadvertently causing so much pain to the nation and the paper," chairman Nduka Obaigbena said.

"We find her action inexcusable and therefore have accepted her resignation."

On Friday Nigeria's state security service said it arrested Daniel and the editor of the paper's Saturday edition. They have not yet been charged and there was no news of their fate Sunday.

Obaigbena expressed regrets and apologies for the losses of life and property as a result of the publication.