ABUJA -- Miss World contestants flew into Britain on Sunday after organizers hastily moved the event from Nigeria as the death toll in riots provoked by the controversial pageant rose to 175.

Nigerian Red Cross President Emmanuel Ijewere said violence continued in the mainly Muslim northern city of Kaduna on Sunday.

"The papers are reporting 200 dead, but our estimate would be slightly less than that. We are talking about 175," he said.

About 12,000 people have been made homeless and the number of injured in hospital is between 1,100 and 1,200, he said as quoted by Reuters.

The violence erupted on Wednesday, when Muslims reacted angrily to comments on the Miss World beauty pageant in a national newspaper.

Relieved beauty queens climbed aboard a chartered flight and headed to London, the city now slated to hold the contest still scheduled for December 7.

The rioting began on Wednesday as a protest against an article in a national newspaper that offended Muslims because it said the Prophet Mohammad (S) would have married one of the Miss World beauty queens were he alive today.

That unrest led to a series of clashes in different areas of the sprawling city, with fighting spreading from majority Muslim to Christian-dominated areas. Attacks on Muslims in Christian areas on Friday night and Saturday morning led to reprisals by Muslims in Kaduna's Kawo district, eyewitnesses said.

The largely Islamic north of Nigeria has witnessed deadly eruptions of sectarian and ethnic clashes since about a dozen of the 36 federal states began implementing strict Muslim Sharia law in 2000.

The British-run Miss World Organization and its local representatives, Silver Bird Promotions, said the decision to move the venue of the beauty pageant was taken "in the overall interests of Nigeria and the contestants".

Nigeria's ***This Day*** newspaper apologized for running the offending November 16 article. The newspaper said its Saturday edition editor Simon Kolawole was arrested on Friday.

Nigeria won the right to host this year's pageant after Nigerian Agbani Darego was crowned Miss World 2001, the first Black African to win the title.

Muslim groups in Nigeria called the pageant "a parade of nudity" and threatened to disrupt it.

Organizers had to shift the event from November to December to prevent it falling in the Muslim fasting month of Ramazan.

Two years ago thousands were killed in violence stemming from non-Muslim opposition to plans to introduce Islamic Sharia law in Kaduna.

Over 10,000 people are estimated to have died in political violence since Nigeria's return to democracy from military rule in 1999. The present violence is raising fears of turbulence during national elections due in the first half of next year.