Bodies of suspected Islamists lay outside Maiduguri's police HQ

Police in Nigeria have freed more than 180 women and children from a house in the north of the country where they had been held by a radical Islamist sect.

They told the BBC they were held for six days and lived on dates and water.

They were rescued in Maiduguri, where heavy fighting continues between troops and militants of the Boko Haram sect.

Boko Haram is blamed for attacks on police stations and government sites in northern Nigeria, triggering violence that has killed at least 150 people.

The women and children were said to have been abducted from the town of Bauchi, where the violence erupted on Sunday.

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Boko Haram is led by Mohammed Yusuf, who has his base in Maiduguri, capital of Borno province.

Security forces flooded into Maiduguri and began attacking Mohammed Yusuf's compound on Tuesday, shelling it with heavy weapons and exchanging gunfire with militants.

The fierce fighting continued through the night and into Wednesday.

The officer commanding the operation, Col Ben Ahanotu, told the BBC the militants were well-armed and keeping up a steady stream of fire.

He said there were at least 250 armed men guarding Mohammed Yusuf's home, also the headquarters of the sect.

'Foreigners'

There were about another 1,000 people inside the enclave, all believed to be followers of Boko Haram.

Col Ahanotu also said that papers and personal items found on the bodies of the young men that have been killed indicated that many of them were not Nigerian and appear to have come from neighbouring Chad and Niger.

Four states in northern Nigeria have been affected by the violence involving Boko Haram - Borno, Bauchi, Kano and Yobe.

Boko Haram is against Western education. It believes Nigeria's government is being corrupted by Western ideas and wants to see Islamic law imposed across Nigeria. President Umaru Yar'Adua has ordered Nigeria's national security agencies to take all necessary action to contain and repel attacks by the extremists.

"These people have been organising, penetrating our societies, procuring arms, learning how to make explosives and bombs to disturb the peace and force abuse on the rest of Nigerians," he said before departing on a trip to Brazil.

Maiduguri police said 103 had died in the violence in the city, including 90 members of Boko Haram.

In Bauchi, scene of the first bloodshed on Sunday, 176 people remain under arrest. At least 39 people were killed in Bauchi.

Sharia law is in place across northern Nigeria, but there is no history of al-Qaeda-linked violence in the country.

The country's 150 million people are split almost equally between Muslims in the north and Christians in the south.