Calm has returned to the northern Nigerian city of Kaduna after five days of riots connected to the Miss World beauty pageant.

Between 215 and 250 people were killed in the riots and hundreds more injured.

Banks and schools reopened in the city after the contest was relocated to London. But Nigerian authorities say there is still tension and fear of revenge attacks by rival Christian and Muslim groups.

The riots were started by Muslims outraged at the pageant, which the country was to have staged next month.

Trouble began last Wednesday, after an independent newspaper said the Prophet Mohammed would have married one of the Miss World beauty queens.

The offices of the newspaper were burned down.

The deputy governor of a state in Northern Nigeria has called on Muslims to kill the woman who wrote the article. She has since gone into hiding.

Mahamoud Shinkafi says the writer should be killed "just like the blasphemous Indian writer Salman Rushdie." Shinkafi is from Zamfara, one of the states that adopted Islamic law, or Shariah, in 1999.

Rushdie went into hiding after writing his novel The Satanic Verses. The late Iranian leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa — religious edict — on his head in 1989.

State officials in Nigeria can not issue fatwas.

The riots and killing spread from mainly Muslim districts of Kaduna to Christian-dominated areas, in spite of an army-enforced 24-hour curfew.

Many of the people who died were either stabbed, beaten or burned to death.

Analysts are warning that the violence could affect Nigeria's presidential elections scheduled for next year.